


The Soldier's Apprentice

by Umbralpilot



Category: Original Work
Genre: Assassination Plot(s), Child Soldiers, Class Issues, Developing Relationship, Eating Disorders, Exile, Food, Gen, Loyalty, M/M, Mentors, Politics, Souls, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, War, villain origin story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 100,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: Two years ago, Festus Detrich led a revolution, became a magical linchpin, and lost political power; now, he struggles to realize his vision for his country.Three months ago, Saul Samaren was the war's youngest general; now, betrayed, condemned, and exiled, he struggles to rebuild a broken identity and life.In the shadow of war, intrigue, and old wounds, their paths cross.
Kudos: 13





	1. The Gun and the Exile

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes its absolute everything to the Origfic People over at Fail_Fandomanon, who may be a bunch of taxes-knitting velociraptors but have been endlessly kind with their feedback, interest, and enthusiasm. I love you guys a lot. I especially love my beta [Island_of_Reil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil), best of nerds and best of nonnies, I'll write you more fanservicey porn yet I swear.
> 
> This story is a prequel to [Ghosts of the Borderland](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17771978/chapters/41934752), but can be read separately. Find loads more info and ficlets about this world at [the Guardiansverse](https://guardiansverse.dreamwidth.org/).
> 
> 10.7.20: Acts I & II complete! Act III under way. Being updated on FFA in short segments under previous title The Warrior's Apprentice.

When Festus opened his eyes, Ander Kirschen was at his bedside, saying, “Someone will die for this.”

Kirschen’s face was tightly knit with worry, and everything smelled of blood. A hot stab of pain, red edged in white, made Festus realize that blood must be his own. He choked in a breath and looked around the room, as much as he could turn his head without moving any further. Kirschen, of course, standing at the foot of the bed, his crisp general’s uniform spattered crimson against the scarlet. A number of the soldiers who had come East with them, to this small town on the shore of the Essine river. An unfamiliar surgeon, grimly wiping her hands — all surgeons were alike when grim. And finally, himself, limp on the bed like a sack of flour.

He found the source of that pain fast. His right leg was thickly bound — didn’t have to try and move, at least, to know that it was broken. Memory proved harder. He would not open with _What happened?_ like some gaping fool.

He said, “Didn’t someone already?”

Kirschen added a scowl on top of his frown, though relief shimmered in his eyes. He came to the head of the bed to grasp Festus’s hand, a grip so tight it briefly distracted from the pain in his leg. While the others shifted uncomfortably, Festus pulled on the dregs of recollection. They had been at the edge of the town, about to ride away. He had had one foot in the stirrups. There had been a gunshot.

His wound did not ache like a gunshot wound did. Festus knew the pain of gunshots intimately. “Did I fall under my damned horse, Kirschen.”

“It fell on top of you first, so there is that.” His lover’s voice sizzled with angry warmth like a snapping hearth-fire. _The finest man in Hyem_. Festus could not quite help it, weak and hazy with pain as he was; he opened his mind to the soul-web of the country. Teased out, by instinct, the thin glowing filament that flowed from Kirschen’s bright and loyal core. “The shot passed an inch from your head and clean through your horse’s neck. It was ugly going. Your leg —

“Broken and badly lacerated, with heavy bleeding. You suffered a bad shock, but at least you were out while I set and stitched — _don’t_ move!” The surgeon shoved a still-bloody hand against Festus’s chest to push him down before he could raise himself as much as a handspan. He recognized her now; she had ridden with his soldiers before, in the revolution, and had gained familiarity and lost patience with his habits in equal measure. “Sun’s sake. Heal yourself if you want to help me.”

Every laceration pounded along Festus’s leg, hip to foot, the fracture blazing in the midst of it. He felt as heavy and cold as an iced corpse. Most Land’s Own Guardians would not have let such a wound lie. _Yes_ , said his body, _take_ _only a drop of soul-power.._.

 _No_ , said his mind. _Not even a drop_.

Kirschen spoke then, thankfully, pulling his attention back out of the temptation of the web. “I had them all spread out while I took you back. They found the assassin with his head shot nearly off, by his own gun — knew he had failed, I suppose.”

“Where was he hidden?” It was all open land, on the very edge of town. They would not have let their guard down otherwise.

“The orchard, some five hundred yards away.”

That cleaved right through the haze. Festus shoved up on his elbows again, for all the surgeon’s outrage. “ _Five hundred yards_?”

“Ah,” Kirschen said, with a sudden upward twitch in one corner of his mouth. “And here is the good news.”

Half turning aside, he gestured one of the soldiers forward with a flick of his hand. The man held his hands out as though bearing up a sacred offering, and the offering was a rifle, sleek and mean, still flecked with its last owner’s dried blood. Festus knew the model instantly: he had never before seen one in Hyemi hands.

His heart thrummed a burst of excitement that made him violently dizzy. He said, “The rest of you, out.”

The soldiers shifted and shuffled, but obeyed, as soldiers would. The surgeon — Festus searched the shambles of his mind for the name. “Ärztin Einken. Mara. These are matters of state. I promise not to sit up.”

“General Kirschen will tell me,” she warned with a flash of anger, but she followed the others.

As soon as the door was shut, Festus sat up. it was tremulous, agonizing business, and he did it in one sharp push.

“You mean to tell me,” he gasped, breathless with pained effort. “You mean to tell me that I can march into Parliament and tell them that their Land’s Own Guardian was nearly killed with an Adalan gun, not twenty miles from the Adalan border?”

Kirschen moved to steady him. He would, of course, never tell. “Apt compensation for the horse, I should say.”

“They’ll hand me the war wrapped in a ribbon.”

“They will hand you an inquiry, but I cannot say what they might hope to find, with such evidence to hand.” Slowly, not so much hesitant as furtive, Kirschen’s warm touch moved down his back, toward his hip and the pain shooting up it. A trembling edge to his care, drawn as a thin film over igneous rage. “Not an unwelcome delay. Ärztin Einken will want you off your feet.”

“Sun’s _sake_.” Why did it have to be his leg? With a broken arm or rib, one could up and walk within the hour, if one was of a mind to. “I’ll need a damned rolling chair. And a trained horse.” He hissed as Kirschen’s fingers lingered over a bloodstained bandage. “Tomorrow I must go to that orchard and see what I can find there. Of course they’ll want a damned inquiry — stop it, you mother goose.”

Kirschen’s hand froze. “I would rest tomorrow, if I were you. Another few days at least.”

“You are not me.” _No one is._ “Find me that horse.”

“Festus.” His lover’s voice was low. “We have time. There are roads to build. Men to train. We are… not ready.”

Festus forced a breath into the very bottom of his lungs. He was considerably dizzier than he’d realized. _It will never be as quick as you wish._

He had waited, planned, and prepared for two years, since the day the new parliament had convened after the revolution. Eight since Hyem’s last humiliating defeat to Adalas, not ten miles away down the Essine. Fifteen since he had become a soldier, knowing that without high birth, only soldiers stood to accomplish anything in this world. Another few days, Kirschen was saying, with sense, and with love.

Sense might have moved him. Love just made him angry.

“The horse, Kirschen,” he demanded in the face of the older man’s resigned sigh. “And order the lot of them to hold their tongues. The official story is an accidental discharge of my own gun. I want control of that inquiry when it comes. We’ll go to the capitol. No — we’ll continue south first. Yes. Horseback, not on the train. The Ilyigan border. I need to know first — I need to see how it is there — can’t have two fronts — so I’ll need a horse, you understand? Tomorrow. I need it —” he trailed off, trying to raise a hand to his spinning head, and missing it by half a foot at least.

Kirschen’s hand moved from his leg to his chest, exchanging gentle probing for a firm push that dropped him back through his dissolving mumbles of annoyance. “I understand,” Kirschen said smoothly, with his ever-soothing, damned aristocratic calm. “The Ilyigan border will give us some time. You may have to make do tomorrow, but I’ll send word ahead to the Guardians at Alsden. For a chair, and a horse.”

“Good… good.” Just a drop of soul-power, and he could be up this very instant, for the orchard, for answers, for a hundred things to put in motion. But the power came from the people, and he would have blood of them already, soon. Even if for their own sakes, their own future.

He struggled to move to another coherent thought. “I need…”

“Sleep.”

“No — yes, but — the gunman. He died.”

“Hideously.” Kirschen’s gray eyes were frosted to their core. “We have the body, but little was left of his head.”

“Good. Imagine if he’d succeeded… imagine.” Kirschen clearly did not care to, but Festus could, and couldn’t help it once he had. The last thought he managed before oblivion took him again — unwelcome, but painless at least — came out fading: “Killing a Land’s Own… imagine, how mighty a Guardian that would have made.”

* * *

The cane was troublesome and attracted attention, and he forgot it every time he tried to rise. But after the two weeks abed he’d endured since the shooting, Festus considered it a glorious freedom. The road to the Ilyigan border had been long, and summer wasting, and even Ander Kirschen’s skills had failed before a task as formidable as finding a warhorse trained for a one-legged rider at such short notice. Even limping on mercilessly cobblestoned streets was better than lying idle in the back of a wagon, surrounded by soldiers as nervous as yearling colts for their injured Land’s Own Guardian. Even here in Alsden.

It had been famous once, Alsden, as the most beautiful city in Hyem bar the capitol. It had certainly been that, fifteen years ago, for a young soldier freshly spat out of his first battle, wounded, crippled, staring. Every fumble as his cane slipped into a crack in the road sent Festus into a brief blinding blaze of sense-memory. The southern weather was the same now as it had ever been, heady and fragrant in late summer. His mind brought up the silky scent of Ilyigan olive oil mingling freely with prickly Hyemi pine oil, of dates and oranges piled in the market. But clearer in his memory were the faces that had lined the streets. Hyemi and Ilyigan and their mingled families, all watching the column of broken soldiers chased out of the borderland in bitter defeat. All desperate for news, in those days of the first savage strokes of the Ilyigan civil war. The war that was to crumble all their lives. Festus had had no more news to give them than any of his comrades; it had been weeks before he could even speak through the pain.

The faces had only grown more haggard since, the tapestry of smells vanished with the cross-border trade. Now Alsden smelled of refugees’ hardscrabble cooking, the dust of closed storefronts, and sickly unwashed children. It felt almost appropriate to meet the city again hobbling and hurting. Festus loved every speck of dirt in his country, every ivy leaf on every old wall, every loose pebble in every road. But Alsden he loved grudgingly.

“The refugees have been much fewer, this past month,” Nils Viskinde, the city’s garrison commander, had told him that morning over breakfast with Kirschen and the city’s two Guardians listening in. Viskinde was short and slim and unassuming, and had proven his genius for the subtler aspects of warfare by emerging from the revolution reasonably respected by both the Kaiser and Festus’s own People’s Army. “I hear that Gabrello Attoré’s army controls everything South of the Santi fork, and that Ilyiga is as quiet as it has been in fifteen years. But little information crosses the border now.”

“They say Attoré blames the civil war on meddling foreigners,” one of the Guardians had put in. “He hangs a man for spying once a week.”

Kirschen had snorted softly at that. “They say.” He had stood behind Festus’s chair, and Festus tried not to resent the way all others in the room looked over his head to the man upright behind him. Technically speaking, Kirschen was the military commander; Festus was nothing but the Land’s Own, now. “What of the refugees in the city?”

“They’ve been quiet, General. Almost unnervingly so.” Viskinde exchanged glances with the two Guardians. “Word has it — we have no confirmation, mind — “

“And yet?”

Viskinde put his hands together on the table, uneasy. “Word has it that one of Attoré’s former generals is in the city. Exiled.”

Now it was Kirschen’s turn to trade a glance with Festus, who leaned a little forward in his chair. Here was a word not bandied about every day. “ _Exiled?_ Attoré’s own general?”

“So it’s rumoured, but we have not found the man nor anything of him but the rumour. If he came among his countrymen here, they would not speak of it. They seem…” Viskinde had looked unaccountably troubled, for a spymaster used to dealing with whispers and riddles. “It’s not fear that drives their silence. I suspect it’s shame.”

“What do you hope to get out of a man shamefully exiled?” Kirschen had asked an hour later in their room, while Festus was exchanging his uniform for plain civilian dress and cursing at having to take shears to perfectly good trousers for the blasted cast.

“Better information than Viskinde has. Every move I might make next depends on quiet along the Ilyigan border.”

“And you can find him where Viskinde and all his men cannot?”

“Viskinde hasn’t my means.” He was no longer a military commander, but the power he did command had its uses.

“I shan’t tell him you said so.” Kirschen stepped closer at Festus’s groan of frustrated pain, rubbed a hand over the fiercely knotted muscles of his thigh and knee above the cast. “He will not like this, and Parliament will like it less. What is a Land’s Own Guardian doing, gathering military intelligence?”

 _What others can’t, to begin with_. “Say it’s for the inquiry. We know the assassin was not Hyemi, now let us establish that he wasn’t Ilyigan. Who knows what hidden enemies may be involved.”

“Who knows,” Kirschen echoed dryly. His kneading fingers paused, and his voice dropped. “Every man in the country knows you to be quick to action. But you do not worry that the court will see you as openly wanting war?”

“Ander, my heart’s own.” Festus had put his hand down on his lover’s, twined their fingers together, squeezed hard. “Anyone who worries me already knows exactly what I want.”

And now it was down to the streets of Alsden, walking the edges of the Ilyigan quarter, where grand traders’ mansions had been sectioned into slums to shelter an unending flow of refugees. Tattered laundry hung between window frames wrought with elegant iron flowers; hollow-eyed men sat on marble steps. But at least here no one looked twice at a leg in a cast, and Festus suspected that most of them would not have recognized him either way. One part of his mind sent a constant faint pulse into the soul-web, to keep Hyemi eyes from turning his way. Another probed, scented, attuned to the flavour of popular feeling in the city air. Sniffing out where the tension was tautest, where something might have his people riled. The whole city was soaked in unease like a tanning pit in its stench, but here on the edge of the quarter there was something, something…

It prickled under his skin and pulled him around a corner, into an alley, where the knowledge that violence had been done seemed to stain the tight-together walls. Someone — someone Hyemi — feared this stretch of the path, where it opened again into a small courtyard enveloped in the shade of one great tree. Someone who was nearby.

He needed a rest anyway. Festus circled the tree, found a half-collapsed gate into the yard of an equally half-collapsed house, and stood out of sight to wait.

He couldn’t have said what he was expecting. What he got was a pair of boys, coming together down the narrow pass. One Hyemi, perhaps twelve years old, a pale and gray-eyed Northern lad, well dressed, and soft. Some Northerners still did trade in Alsden, some for charity and some for skinning those who had little choice; Festus could not tell which kind this boy’s family was. But he could tell that deep fear urged the faint scurrying in the boy’s steps, his glances in every direction.

“There,” that boy said, pointing at the tree. “He comes down from that tree every time, and he chases and beats us. He’ll have a knife.”

“Good,” said his companion, who was not Hyemi.

Festus leaned a touch closer to the fence in sudden fascination, despite the risk of revealing himself. He had seen them sometimes in this region, men from Ilyiga’s southern coast, who traced their heritage east to the Inner Sea and fabled Samar. The accent was unmistakable, and there was a trace of the look: in the yellow hair, though much more straw than gold; in the olive skin, the face that could have been fine and striking were it not painfully gaunt. But he had never seen this sort so young. This fellow, this boy — fourteen, fifteen? And some eight hundred miles from home.

This boy was not soft. Festus could count his ribs when a ripple of wind blew his torn shirt open. This boy bent down at the foot of the tree, hefted up a broken branch as thick as his arm, and gave it a testing swing. A scarecrow that moved like a hunter.

“I’m ready,” the Ilyigan boy called out up into the tree. “Come down.”

Festus was almost surprised when someone did come down: another Hyemi youth, slightly older and rather taller and thicker. He did have a knife: a soldier’s tool, not a butcher’s or cook’s. Stolen — or perhaps the youth was a deserter, since he held the weapon well. He looked at the pair before hm and chuckled. “I’ll be. You did bring a champion.”

“I told you,” the Hyemi boy said fiercely. “You can’t lord over the whole street and you can’t take any more of my father’s money. Go crawl back to — to — “

“That’s him, then?” the Ilyigan interrupted; and when his companion nodded approval, turned straight around swinging the broken branch.

Festus couldn’t have said what he was expecting. What he got was butchery. It lasted five seconds, if that. The armed youth had not been ready for the swing, nor remotely for his opponent’s speed and skill. The Ilyigan boy dropped the branch through its arc, flowed into the youth’s space, grabbed the wrist of his knife hand, twisted it around, and planted the blade through his neck. All one movement. Silent and hideous and perfect.

He tore the knife out and had wiped it clean on the dead youth’s shirt before the gush of blood from the open throat had slowed.

“Done.”

The Hyemi boy stared up at his champion. He was, Festus realized, too shocked to scream. 

“You killed him,” he mewled.

“What did you think I was going to do? Pay up.”

“I thought you’d — scare him, beat him —” The pale hands, now the colour of curdled milk, clenched and trembled. He scrambled for and nearly dropped a pouch hidden under his shirt. “He was just a street thug…!”

“Well, I’m not. I’m a soldier. Is that all?” The Ilyigan squinted at the handful of coins thrust at him.

“It’s what we agreed.”

“You said he’ll have more money.” He knelt by the cooling corpse, but rummaging all over it brought him nothing, and he kicked it with a growl as he rose. The sound of wet impact made the Hyemi boy quiver on the edge of bolting. “Don’t you dare run. How much money do you have?”

“You were supposed to protect my money!” the Hyemi boy wailed as his champion turned on him again. “We said ten kroner! We said!”

“That’s nothing. That won’t buy a day’s meals.”

“How much do you _eat_?” The Hyemi boy tried to pull back, clutched his pouch to him in a blind panicked instinct gone awry. The Ilyigan turned the knife in his hand, easy. Not so much to intimidate as to consider the swiftest, cleanest angle.

Festus had seen enough and more. He pushed through the gate, startling both children. Even as he did, he shoved at the Hyemi boy within the web, a push that overcame his stupor and sent him running, hurtling back down the narrow pass. It was a gamble — he could hardly give chase if the Ilyigan boy decided to run after the Hyemi one. But he took it. And now it was them two, he and the boy with the knife.

“Put it down, lad,” Festus said, low, calm, openly threatening.

The boy’s eyes — brown, Festus noted, a surprisingly warm colour — met his directly. Level and steady, and as honed as his taken blade. No evaluating look at the cast or the cane, nor at the easy, confident stance of the man before him. Everything was instantaneous: he knew danger, and he was ready to meet it.

“You can’t fight like this,” the boy said, only half a statement.

“Do you want to try me?” Very much a real question.

The young Ilyigan considered, rather as though weighing an invitation to tea.

“I am not with the watch, or with the garrison.” Festus did not quite change his tone, but spoke more slowly; then, in a flash of inspiration, continued in the boy’s own language: “I am a Guardian of Hyem.”

Those watchful eyes widened. At the familiar tongue, Festus thought at first, then realized. _Fourteen, fifteen_? A child of civil war.

“I’ve never seen a Guardian before,” the boy said quietly.

“Not a disappointment, I hope.”

“Show me your power.”

Festus smirked. “So you can think how to get the better of it?”

The boy frowned. He turned the knife once in his hand, weighed it, anchored his fingers about it.

“I don’t intend to harm, banish, or arrest you,” Slower yet, on the edge of open coaxing. Too open and the lad would run. A child of civil war: a stranger who meant him no harm might be as rare a thing in his mind as a Guardian. “That isn’t my function. I have questions of how it goes in Ilyiga. That is all I want from you.” He decided not to mention the rumour of the exiled commander for the moment. Step by step. Beginning with this moment’s coup de grâce. “Choose a place to your liking, and we’ll speak over a meal.”

The offer had ten times the effect he had expected. Something glazed in the boy’s eyes, some terrible curtain drawn over all want and fear and reason. There was no knife as sharp as hunger.

The boy swallowed. “Show me your power,” he repeated, raking out the words.

This, Festus could not refuse. Not this straining to hold something short of clean surrender, from this boy who had never seen a Guardian.

He held the boy’s eyes as his will searched and reached, into his core and out past his skin, to his roots, to the web, to the sprawling stretches of light leaping between nine million souls, threading through the land. To Hyem, that great skein of place and people. Here in Alsden the stuff of that weave trembled, thrummed uncomfortably with the nearness of the borderland and the awareness of the war beyond it. Here, he had to be careful what threads of memory he pulled on. His recollections of past pain were still quite clear enough to rouse like to like within the warp and weft of his people’s memories, the very thing that made this place _Hyem_. But he worked past those to the raw stuff of the power in within the earth itself and all else that rooted and grew within it. He gestured to turn the boy’s gaze to the tree.

Summer was waning: the canopy was dotted with red and with gold. But those were joined by bright new green now, as soul-power pushed and stroked fresh leaves from the branches. Accelerated into the space of a minute, a tiny echo of spring.

He had done this before, for this reason and that, in the two years since his ascension as Land’s Own. As tricks went, it was a small one, even in this city that breathed down his neck all the while. But the Ilyigan boy watched, spellbound, almost — just almost — loosening his grip on the knife. And for a moment, in those eyes, Festus saw something wake beyond hunger and watchfulness. Something that glittered like wonder.

He didn’t let go of the weapon, in the end, and Festus let him tuck it in his belt. But he came a step closer, and then another, and finally looked at his first Guardian up and down as though seeing, for the first time, a fellow man.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll speak with you.”

* * *

Half an hour, four apples, three cheese pasties, and two and a half bowls of roast sausage and potatoes later, Festus finally learned the boy’s name.

“Saul. From Tezzei.” He mumbled it around a too-big mouthful. He did not so much eat as inhale, and Festus already knew he’d be bringing half of it back up sooner rather than later. In the shaded courtyard of the small, empty restaurant, his wide eyes were constantly wandering, from the bowl to the door to the hedge around them, to the Guardian in the chair opposite him, and back. Up close, he was even thinner than Festus had realized, and desperately filthy, still flecked with blood from his earlier kill. “Don’t ask me how it is there now. I’ve been gone five years.”

“Do folk often ask?”

Saul shrugged. “It was a great city, Tezzei,” he said in the droning voice of a child reciting a parent’s dubious wisdom.

“So they say. Once.” The city of blue glass, the golden-hearted city, sea-gate to the East. A dozen passages from a dozen books now long outdated — books from before the civil war — floated up in Festus’s mind. He had read himself into marvellous dreams of the glass and gold of Tezzei. Once. “Did your family run?”

“No. I left with my unit.” Another shrug, a swallow, another overloaded forkful. “Is it true that Guardians can kill souls?”

He asked it with a boy’s casual curiosity, the bulk of his attention still on his food and his restless surveillance. Festus kept his own expression carefully still. _Left with my unit_ — but why should the implications surprise him? He was a solider. He knew war. “Souls cannot be killed. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.” And, without lingering, “How do you fight, with a power like making trees grow?”

“Not all Guardians fight,” Festus said softly.

He knew war; this was nothing that should move him. How old were some of those who had marched with the People’s Army, in the revolution? _Not eleven_. Small wonder that the boy could kill an armed man a foot taller than him in a heartbeat. The true wonder was that he had lived to gain that skill.

And how he was here, in Hyem. _What on Earth is a creature like this doing in Hyem?_

Saul seemed doubtful of the answer he was given, but continued to be mostly occupied with his meal. Or to give the impression of such, at least: Festus was not entirely fooled, and knew that the lad knew he wasn’t. They looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, in a mutual uncertainty softened by fascination, then hardened again by how soldiers always looked at the unknown.

“Tell me about Ilyiga,” Festus said abruptly. It was, in theory, why he had wanted to speak with the boy in the first place. “How far North has Gabrello Attoré come?”

The young face sealed like that of a man twenty years older. “Why ask me? The city is full of refugees.”

“Civilians. You look fresh off the battlefield.” _In truth you look like you’ve hardly left it._

“I’ve spent a month in the city and two before that in the borderland.” That did somewhat explain his good spoken Hyemi, and nothing else besides. “I don’t know where the army is now.”

“Word has it that Attoré is consolidating north of the Santi. Winning the trust of the folk there. Boy soldiers would be an inconvenience, ones with Samari looks doubly so. Is that why you left?”

Saul’s fingers remained about the fork, but their tips had gone white. “Why do you want to know?” he demanded.

“It’s true, then.”

“It’s not. I’m not Attoré’s man.”

“You are not from an enemy faction he’d defeated. Not running from a lost battle — not you.” He stated it for the plain fact it was, and Saul took it as his due, not one whit moved by the suggestion of a compliment. “You suspect me because Attoré claims the Hyemi meddle in the civil war.”

“Don’t you? He always said, one day Hyem will invade. The war is all your trick to make us weak, he said.”

Plain denial would do nothing, but Festus blinked as something else occurred to him. “Did he send you across the border to spy?” Impossible. Whatever gifts the boy had, this was clearly not his forte. But as a handy excuse to do away with a fierce little thorn in one’s side... “He lied to you, if he did. Look at you.”

“What about me?” Saul’s voice had gone dangerously low.

“Alone, lost, and starving. Lucky not to be rotting in a jail cell. Clearly he did not think you could get much charity, nor blend in with the other refugees. You wouldn’t die neatly in battle, lad, so he sent you to die here.”

Saul shoved the bowl aside and rose to snarl right in his face, “ _I won’t die._ ”

They were the most familiar words in the world. Festus had heard them a hundred, a thousand times, as all soldiers did. Before Alsden, in the gray, sweating line to the border, he had heard them from boys his own age, their first rifles in their hands, desperate to say something, anything, in the face of their first war. In the city, afterward, the broken remains of so many of them had said the same while bleeding out or baking with fever. The words were etched into his memories of the streets. They said, _I won’t die; the world wouldn’t be so unkind_.

Not this boy. This boy said, _I won’t die; the world wouldn’t dare._

Festus had leaned toward him in turn before he quite knew it. “I will invade,” he said to those fierce young eyes. “But not Ilyiga. I’m going to invade Adalas.”

He could tell Saul realized he was honest, because the boy drew back in sharp shock and confusion, for a moment even forgetting to pick up his dropped fork.

“What’s Adalas to do with Ilyiga?”

Festus leaned back himself. “Think it through.”

“Isn’t Adalas east of — ah. You don’t want two fronts.”

“Clever boy.”

“I’m sixteen.” And something else in his voice, something colder than youthful annoyance at being patronized. Festus watched closely, absorbed in the play of thought he’d set in motion. “So you want this border quiet. No worries about protecting it from factions that Attoré’s pushing north — or from Attoré himself.”

“Would Gabrello Attoré make a push for the borderland?”

“He still had too much trouble where he was, last I knew. He wanted us younger fighters to disband and go home — this was the men’s war now, he said.” The lad’s mouth twisted. He stabbed a piece of sausage until fork grated against plate. “But a lot of them just became outlaws. Could’ve told him it would happen. Old men are fools. What do you fight Adalas for?”

“Revenge for earlier defeat. Trading rights on the Essine.” That much was easy. “To stop their economy from outstripping ours even further.” There was an inexplicable delight in speaking so openly to a sharp listener. One who had no stakes, no preconceptions, no interests. Who spoke to him as one soldier to another. “Because they’re a handy enemy, and this land needs a war.”

Saul lingered over this, chewing on a mouthful and the thought at the same time. A step too far, perhaps, with a boy who had not seen his hometown in five years. Who might have left behind — no. No shadow of a life that might have been hung over these young shoulders. At length he said, “They told us that war destroyed the children of my land.”

It was someone else’s voice again, just as when he had spoken of Tezzei and the greatness that had been. “Civil war is a whole other matter. A war between countries costs, yes, costs dearly, but so does any upheaval that lets change take place. And change must happen. The revolution did all it could, but we need more.” Festus struck the wood of the table on that last word. “War is energy. War is opportunity. Need is the mother of invention, and there is no need more urgent than war. Men feel blessed to die to protect their homeland, but they have no scope of what protection means. I do, and I say war will save Hyem, and no man would be so blessed as one who died in the saving of it.”

Now he was sure he’d gone too far. Even Kirschen, who entirely agreed, disliked hearing such words openly from him. _The barricade days are over. You are Land’s Own Guardian now._ _Save it for Parliament_. If Parliament would deign to listen. _How do I guard this land?_

But Saul was not put off, only studied him with queer interest, almost free of suspicion. “You said you’re a Guardian. But you talk like a general.”

“I was one, once.” That made it sound like it was eons ago, and yet the feeling was not inappropriate. He shut the door on the memories sneaking through to focus on the strange look on the boy’s face. “Is it Attoré you’re thinking of?”

The look became shaded with disgust — no, something hotter, acid, like resentment. “Attoré’s a faithless dog. He says he’s making peace in the North, but men didn’t join his army to sit on their arses fishing the Santi.”

As much had occurred to Festus himself. He nodded with a faint chuckle. “You also talk like a — ”

It clicked like a key in a padlock. The boy’s skill, his manner, the way he spoke of the Ilyigan warlord and his expression when he did. His presence in Alsden and his isolation from the other refugees. And his hunger, most of all. That bottomless, mind-scorching hunger, an emptiness beyond that of the flesh.

“The exiled commander,” Festus said. “It’s _you_.”

In less than a heartbeat, Saul was on his feet and leaping for the hedge at the edge of the courtyard. 

For the first time since his ascension, Festus’s power ran ahead of his conscious thought. It plunged into the web woven through the earth and coursed through it to yank the very soil out from under the boy’s feet. Saul stumbled and fell headlong, heavily, choking when his overfull belly hit the ground. He twisted onto his back and yanked the knife from his belt in the same motion. By now Festus was on his feet, for once remembering the cane as a handy weapon. The boy was no fool to try and run again: he launched himself up at Festus as he approached, slashing viper-quick — but not quick enough. The cane’s solid wood caught the flashing edge and forced Saul’s arm up. Then Festus kicked him in the chest with the cast.

It hurt abominably, almost as though the half-healed bone had snapped all over again. But it hurt Saul worse. The boy collapsed back to the ground. All the air went out of him, and the piles of food he’d stuffed himself with followed in a long and miserable bout of retching. Festus didn’t wait for him to finish. Unable to stay on his feet — the surgeon was going to have his head — he went to one knee over the half-sprawled boy.

 _Stay down and I won’t hurt you_. He could have said it. And he’d have been stabbed through the throat for it. He grabbed the matted length of Saul’s hair and smashed the side of the boy’s head against a rock in the grass.

The little general went limp. Festus turned him over to make sure his airways were clear. Feather-light now, he wasn’t struggling, as though between his bones and skin there had been nothing but concentrated defiance.

The makings of a Guardian. _If he were Hyemi…_

It was a strange thought that drifted up into his mind along with, quite suddenly, the full measure of the pain from his leg. Festus breathed in one careful breath, sent a summoning pulse into the web for Alsden’s Guardians, then let himself fold over and bite his hand bloody to stifle a scream. _This is what you get for acting on instinct. You never learn, Detrich. You never will._

But he got the boy, too, even if he had no idea yet quite why.


	2. Vast and Unknown and Uncertain

He was hungry again. Still. Again. It was hard to tell. It didn’t matter.

Of all the miseries he suffered, lying bound hand and foot in the back room where the Hyemi had put and left him, that was what brought Saul closest to the edge of screaming. Everything he’d eaten in the restaurant with the Guardian, the general, whatever he was, everything had come spewing back out of him and left not so much as a shadow of satisfaction. His own fault. All of it, since if he hadn’t been sick, he was certain, the Guardian couldn’t have caught him, for all the man’s skill. He wouldn’t be here in the dark, captured, bound, his head pounding, his stomach still twisted on itself, if only he could have stopped himself from overeating. But he could no more check that need than the need to breathe.

_I’m going to get free and kill them all,_ he reminded himself when the urge to scream made his throat close thick and his eyes almost water. Two men had come and hauled him away to the city garrison’s barracks and put the chains on him: he’d start with them, never mind that they put him on a comfortable bed and had some woman come and wipe his face clean. Then the tall older fellow in an officer’s uniform who had come to take a wondering look at him before his attention turned entirely to the next room. Just for that look, a slow death. And finally, the man in that next room, just visible through the door. The Guardian. The general. He would be easy prey now; he was gray with pain himself.

“ — go and undo two weeks of healing in a moment,” the woman was saying with a sigh. She was sitting by the Guardian’s bed now, probing at the deformed cast on his leg. “I’ll have to cut this open and see if the bone needs resetting.”

“It couldn’t be helped,” the Guardian said, and swallowed hard. _I hope you puke twice as bad as I did and choke on it, you Hyemi bastard._

The woman looked at him wearily. “Can it ever, Fro Detrich?” She rose and disappeared from Saul’s view, though he heard her rummage through a bag. “I guarantee, if you take as much as a step on that foot for the next four weeks, you’ll be crippled for life. Perhaps you want that. Otherwise, you’ll take the first train back to the capitol and stop treating your body as though it were sword-steel. Perhaps you can’t. I wash my hands of this business.” The sound of water running into a basin, as though punctuating the statement.

Prolonged silence followed. Saul could just make out the Guardian exchanging a look with the older officer, a loaded one he couldn’t rightly read. Then the officer asked, voice faintly strained, “And the boy?”

The woman came into view again, looking hesitant. “Concussed, exhausted, very weak,” she said after a beat, and Saul ranked her as third to die, just after the Guardian’s two lackeys. “Desperately underfed. I’ve rarely seen even refugee children in such a state.”

“Soul-hunger,” the Guardian said quietly.

Saul strained to hear more, but all three of them fell into a thick grim silence afterward, giving him nothing but the sounds of the woman tending the Guardian’s wound. Shears cutting, starched fabric cracking, a hum of relief from her and a hissing gasp from him. More pouring water. Saul’s gut churned and his mouth felt as dry as death. Water. He was going to get free and kill them and then he was going to drink as much as his aching stomach would hold. Probably more. 

_And I’ll still be thirsty after._

It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to die. A month in the foreign city. Three months since he’d crossed the border. Six since his sentence of exile. Five years since Tezzei. He wasn’t going to die, even if he had no idea how he was going to live.

Kill them all to start with. What came after would be after.

His body wanted to doze off, but he didn’t permit it. Not among enemies, and not with a head wound. The stabs of hunger were good for that at least. Someone shut the door, and he couldn’t make out the conversation in quick Hyemi beyond. An undetermined length of time later, the officer came into the room and looked him over again. Not in wonder this time. This was a look of pure cold assessment, the kind a man gave a horse or a gun.

“Can you stand?”

Saul jerked a nod at his cuffed feet. “Not like this.”

“It’s ‘like this,’ or being carried.”

_Try it and I’ll strangle you_. But he’d still be chained afterward. “Give me a hand up.”

The officer did so with an ease that betrayed total readiness. He’d been warned of what he was dealing with, Saul thought, and though it was frustrating to know it also pleased him. These Hyemi knew he wasn’t just a weak boy defeated by his own stuffed belly. They’d be careful of him, and he’d deal with them anyhow. “Who are you?” he demanded as the officer pulled him to his feet. “Are you also a Guardian?”

“General Ander Kirschen,” the officer answered, in a tone that implied he only did so because being uncourteous was even further beneath him than respecting the demands of a street rat. “I cleared the southeast borderland of bandits after the revolution. You may have heard of me in your time there.”

Saul had, at length, and the revelation left him as off-balance as his bound feet as he hobbled into the next room. _I’ll deal with them, I’ll deal with him._ When his pulse quickened, he told himself it was with excitement. 

In the other room sat the Guardian, leaning back in an armchair, his newly rebound leg propped up while the bandaging dried. His eyes were faintly tight with pain, but not the slightest bit dulled. A dark and fathomless blue, like the Inner Sea in a storm.

Saul wanted to spit at him, and realized it’d probably make him laugh. “What do you want?”

“Sit down. You’re unsteady.” The Guardian gestured at a chair opposite him, and Kirschen kept a firm hand on Saul’s arm until he was settled. Then, unexpectedly, he nodded at the Guardian and exited without comment.

A small room. The two of them alone. A fire poker in the empty hearth to the southern wall. Saul was in chains, but the Guardian couldn’t stand. He was considering distance, speed, and the handicap of his dizziness when the Guardian spoke, “Saul, was it? And your surname — Alhosti? Pallado? Samaren, perhaps?”

Saul gave a start. “Who told you?”

“No one did. You come from Tezzei and have the Eastern look, and those are the commonest names. Saul Samaren.” He pronounced it perfectly, resonant with curiosity in his deep, arresting voice. “I’m Festus Detrich, Land’s Own Guardian of Hyem.”

_Land’s Own Guardian_. Saul’s breath caught, and for a moment he forgot even his hunger.

The older men told all sorts of stories about Guardians, what they were and what they did. But they all said the same things of a Land’s Own, and so Saul believed them. Before him sat a man who could see souls and look into them, who could call on every drop of soul-power in the web of his nation, in the land beneath their feet —

It came in a flash of fury that burned away his wonder. “You made me fall, you whoreson.”

“I evened the ground,” Detrich said dryly, gesturing at his leg.

“I could’ve killed you.”

“Could you have? Assume I didn’t have my power. You think you could beat me, if all things were fair?”

Saul remembered the block with the cane, the expert twist of the Land’s Own’s arm. He’d seen their like. Then he remembered Detrich kicking him to the ground with a broken leg, and hesitated a second too long.

“We could try again when we’re both well enough for it,” Detrich spoke low into his silence. “But you are not getting well, lad.”

It was the bare truth, and Saul snarled to hear it. Having it out didn’t change a thing. _I told you I won’t die_.

“What do you know about it?” he growled.

“About soul-hunger? Everything. I’m the Land’s Own.” A flash of memory darkened his blue eyes to near-black. “I’ve sent men into exile. It’s not done to the undeserving. What crime was it — mutiny? Desertion?”

Desertion was such a ridiculous charge, Saul almost laughed. “You don’t know anything,” he told Detrich, oddly relieved to realize that. This Land’s Own of Hyem couldn’t see into him.

Detrich said, “I think Attoré was afraid of you.”

To Saul’s staring face, he went on, “Not unjustly, at that. Your skill is frightening. And a boy who’s started fighting so young — younger than eleven, I’d bet — and survived to become a commander would scare any man who wants to rule what he’d conquered someday. It’s not as simple as killing you, even if he could. It’s your reputation that most needs ruining, and nothing does that like exile. Am I close? I had to think it through while my leg was being fixed, and pain does nothing for my mind.”

_You’re wrong_. The urge to throw that in Detrich’s face just to douse the man’s unbearable easy confidence, leave him flailing, was hard to resist. But Saul didn’t know what lie he could give him instead. He grappled with the question in a damning silence. How was it that some Hyemi could give him the benefit of the doubt when none of his own countrymen, his brothers-in-arms and his commander, had?

“Attoré _was_ right to fear me,” he snarled at last. “I’ve been killing since I was six. I’ve killed more men than half his other generals combined. I led boys my own age and younger to burn villages, so many that the Westerners had a special prayer to try to keep us away. When they wanted a reason to exile me, they had it easy!”

“That’s how war is,” Detrich said flatly.

“What do _you_ know about it?!”

“Everything. You think I plan to start a war without knowing what that means?”

Saul stopped in his tracks. He had forgotten the Land’s Own’s talk of invading Adalas to save his country, or had put it from his mind, assuming it was just that, talk.

_But he_ was _a general once._ That was certainly no lie. A general, and still a warrior who could make even Saul pause.

Defiance, surprise, and defiance again were draining. He was so hungry. “What do you want from me?”

Detrich sat back in his chair and lay an open palm on one armrest. “I want to take you back to the capitol with me.”

There was nothing in Saul’s mouth but awful, bitter spit, but he managed to choke on it anyway. Detrich continued without a beat missed, “I saw you fight for all of seconds and it was enough. You have a genius for it. I’m sure you’ve been told this before. Adalas will have all the advantage of armament in this war; Hyem must have the edge in skill and spirit. I want you to be my soldier.”

Saul continued staring. He stared for so long, he thought Detrich must’ve expected him to, since he said nothing further to prompt him. 

“You’re trying to trick me,” he said. Nothing else made a lick of sense.

“Into what? What else would I do with you in the capitol?”

“Kill me.” But he could’ve done that already. “Sell me.”

“That’s not done in Hyem. No, don’t give me that look. Not even in brothels.”

“I’m not Hyemi,” Saul said acidly.

“No. But you must live somewhere, since you mean to live.” Detrich leaned forward in his seat. “I’ll house and feed you ‘til you have your strength back. Train you.”

“What do I need to train for? I can outfight any man alive.”

Detrich smirked within his dark beard. “Not me.”

If Saul could have spat at that, he would have, and been done with the whole affair.

But he remembered, again, the force of the kick sending him sprawling to the ground, retching miserably. It’d been a stupid move, really. Could only have worked as a fight-finisher, since it had left Detrich incapacitated. And that only because the kick had leveraged the weight of the cast into Saul’s stomach, only because his stomach had been so much too full. A desperate move from a crippled combatant who knew he had to finish the fight in one hit or die.

But it hadn’t been desperate or stupid. It had been a calculated gamble. It’d worked.

He said, “I want to fight you again.”

“When we’re well.”

“You said I won’t get well.”

“Not on your own. Alone, exiles die.” He said it too plainly to be lying, for all Saul had told him again and again, _I won’t_ — “Soul-hunger surpasses the mind and the will. Unless you have someone to check you, you’ll overeat and throw it up every time until it kills you — starvation or a burnt throat or a burst stomach, something ugly no matter which way. But you can learn to check yourself, in time. It gets easier.”

“Does it ever stop?”

“Not completely. But… it gets easier.”

Saul breathed in. He felt it again, what must’ve been the urge to scream. His throat and eyes were hot. “Why does it happen?”

“Exile cuts your soul from the web,” Detrich said quietly. “Like a lost limb that keeps hurting, the severed roots and filaments ache. Your body doesn’t understand. Your mind tells you that something is missing in the only way it knows.”

It made sense. Saul had met plenty of men with lost limbs that hurt. He’d asked many of them, too, if the pain ever stopped. They’d said no, mostly, but they all lived with it anyway.

_Something is missing_. The crystal blue of the southern sky, the smell of the Inner Sea, the taste of olives rolled in flatbread, the sound of people speaking his mother tongue around him. The flash of glass beads about his wrist, Tezzei glass, last memento of a city that had been great. But they’d smashed those in the dirt and sent him to die under a foreign sky.

Detrich was looking at him closely, and something about the look sparked a comforting rage in his chest. He met the Land’s Own’s eyes, almost as blue as the sea.

“I’ll learn,” he said coldly, jerking his chin up. “Tell me when we leave.”

* * *

Saul spent the first hour of the train ride hunkered in his bunk bed, nerve ends twitching with the attack of noise and smoke and speed and churning power. Then he pulled himself to the window and pressed his nose against the glass to devour the sight of the passing countryside. The train was much faster than a horse, and hills, fields, villages all came and went, restful and nameless. Everything was green, except where wheat was golden, or forests were beginning to go to rust. Beyond the howling of the train, everything was peaceful.

They rode in their own compartment. Detrich had bitterly complained of being unable to join the other soldiers, but even after the surgeon had relented to allow him some hobbling about on a crutch, the necessity stood and he accepted it. He was utterly graceless in defeat. While Saul watched out the window, Detrich lay back on his own bed and read through an endless pile of papers and found some scathing comment to make on each one. Saul couldn’t follow a word, but he liked that the man’s attention wasn’t on him. It wasn’t easy, sitting in a space with no clear way out with a near-stranger. He kept subtly testing the glass, wondering if he could smash through it if he got hold of Detrich’s crutch.

He was getting further and further from the border. The speed of travel made Hyem feel endless. The one time they saw a column of smoke rise in the distance, Detrich told him that it was a factory.

“No battles anywhere?”

“Not in Hyem.”

Around midday, General Kirschen appeared in their compartment, along with a young man who laid out a meal for three. Or close to, at least. The two Hyemi got each a plate of thick meat stew with egg noodles. Saul got a bowl of rice porridge, half the size.

“You’re relearning how to eat,” Detrich told him, after Kirschen had kicked his feet out from under him when he’d tried to snatch the general’s sword. “First steps are slow.”

That salved nothing of the bruising to Saul’s knees or pride, but the fall left him too dizzy for a second try, and the porridge was hot. Detrich and Kirschen talked about business he didn’t understand in places he didn’t know. He tried to focus on his food, to remember things like flavour and texture existed. The meal didn’t ease his hunger one bit, but he kept it down.

When he was done, Detrich pushed a half-full mug of beer under his nose. “It’ll help you sleep.”

Saul stared at him, appalled. “I’m an Easterner.”

“An Easterner who needs sleep. Your faith’s law says nothing of medicine. Or you could call it a toast of thanksgiving.”

_How does he know the law?_ “You’re trying to drug me.”

“Lad,” Detrich said wearily, “we’re in my country, on a train full of my soldiers. There’s nothing I might want from you that I couldn’t take. Drink the damned beer.”

Saul thought of smashing the mug and slashing his face. But too sharp or sudden a movement might make him sick again, and besides Kirschen was watching like a hawk. He picked up the mug and drank very slowly.

It was heavy and bitter, and even the taste of the alcohol was nothing like it was in wine. He wondered if there were Eastern temples in the Hyemi capitol, and if he could find a sacerdote to ask whether beer could be medicine, and before the thought or the mug were finished it had all gone to his head and the world was muffled and gently tilted. The churning of the train was not unlike the swaying of a boat in the shallows near the shore.

He lay back on the bunk bed. He didn’t relax enough to sleep, but he closed his eyes and all was quiet.

The train sped all day through a changing landscape: as foothills grew higher, forests grew denser, and the end of summer seemed to unfold as though time had been converted to distance, with more and more trees flecked red and gold. Then the trees too began to change, swapping broad leaves for needles, and the shapes of the houses in the villages grew slowly stranger, and Saul pulled back from the window feeling his dizziness pulled to a fever pitch by the sense that the world was vast and unknown and uncertain. He stayed with his back pressed to the wall and his eyes low after that, until, sometime after a late sunset, the lights of a town shone into the compartment and drowned out the lamp Detrich had been reading by. The train slowed, then stopped with a sound like a living thing breathing out in relief.

Detrich looked up and through the window with a subtle relief of his own. “Up. The train will stay here until dawn, and we might as well — oh, Sun’s sake — “

Saul followed his gaze to see Kirschen leading two men pushing a rolling chair to the compartment door. Detrich looked like he was facing a firing squad. “I might just stay here,” he groused.

The facts of the matter occurred to Saul in a flash. He would never get any sleep with the man still in the compartment — the small, closed compartment, the man who he already knew could overpower him. He opened his mouth to protest.

“But you need to sleep alone, don’t you,” Detrich said before he spoke a word.

It would have been a sharp demand; having it forestalled in this way left Saul gaping stupidly, lost for leverage. He could only stare at Detrich glanced again through the window, ran a hand through his long, loose hair, and sighed. “I’d rather you were here than having to install you in town. Very well. Lock the door and I’ll see that you’re not disturbed.” And, after a moment’s thought, “Someone will bring you dinner.”

Dinner took a while to come, and was disappointing: more rice, cooked in chicken broth. But after Saul ate it, and was surprised at being able to keep his meal down twice in one day, something seemed to clear in his mind. Some hideous veil of desperation pierced through. Whatever his soul didn’t know, his body realized that some strength was coming back into it, drop by grain of broth and rice. He lay back on the bunk bed again, dazed with the feeling. The door was locked, the platform empty. When he put out the lamp, the dark was total.

He tested the glass of the window one more time, then curled up in that dark to sleep, further away from home than he had thought a man could be and remain alive.

* * *

The train set out again a little after dawn, soldiers and passengers wandering in, yawning. Much of the day was the same as the last, except that the terrain grew more rugged as the train rushed through mountain passes, and that Saul’s midday meal included a red apple bigger than his fist. He managed to eat it slowly, though he thought of the oranges of the south coast all the while.

But not much later, to the obvious confusion of Detrich and Kirschen — sitting in the compartment arguing about something to do with protocol in the Hyemi parliament — the train ground and groaned to a stop. When it had lingered long minutes, all three of them glanced out the window, though Saul saw nothing but other passengers peeking out in similar uncertainty. Kirschen left, and soon returned looking grim.

“A landslide. The tracks are buried. A work party is on its way, but will not get here before dark.”

To Saul’s surprise, Detrich perked up with a look of near-excitement. “A work party? Did they forget I’m here?”

“They would rather not trouble you, I suppose, with the injury…”

“Give me this kind of trouble every day.” He reached for his crutch and used it to push himself up, Kirschen clearly hovering. Saul followed closely as he limped out, half-curious, half-alarmed by the Land’s Own’s spike of energy. Kirschen made a token attempt at gesturing Detrich to the rolling chair, but couldn’t even get the man to brace himself on his arm as they descended from the train into the small crowd that had formed. People parted to make room, watching and muttering.

They were Hyemi of every type and rank, as varied a group as Saul had seen in Hyem so far: many soldiers, but also well-dressed traders coming out from the private compartments in the front, nervous before the rabble. Workaday folk, too, used to delay, chattering and smoking and offering each other bits of bread and cheese. Women, both poor and with their babies slung close to their chest and rich with their round-cheeked children lingering obediently behind. The Southern type that Saul knew from Alsden, brown like many Ilyigans but with fine straight hair like their countryfolk, and pale Northern Hyemi with high cheekbones and arresting gray eyes. They had all been looking at the rocks and mud covering the train tracks, but as soon as Detrich emerged, they all looked at him.

Only at him. Saul felt comfortably invisible at the Land’s Own’s side. But Detrich disregarded the attention and didn’t address the crowd. He turned and spoke to the smoking workers, who quickly shook themselves out of their fascination to answer. Yes, this happened often on this stretch of the line; some of them had been in working parties clearing the tracks before. It was corvée duty, but they didn’t mind as they might have because the train was so important to the region. Though there had been some grumbling that with all the increased trade surely some money could be found to pay them. A soldier born in a nearby village mentioned that a Lansikaan engineer had come by a year back with a plan to reinforce the mountainside, but was laughed out of town, which in retrospect may have been foolish. One of the well-dressed merchants came forward, hat in hand, and haltingly confessed that he was a repentant Royalist — Saul couldn’t parse that, but saw Detrich’s face harden — asking if he could prove his change of heart to the Land’s Own Guardian by helping to finance a solution to the problem.

“What proof?” Detrich told him. “Nothing you do to prove yourself to _me_ has any worth. It’s your countrymen who deserve proof — no, service. Otherwise what’s the use of your repentance?” As the man shifted in place, shamefaced but glancing curiously at the workers, Detrich finally raised a hand to call for the attention of the crowd.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, in a grand and resonant voice like a bell from a mountaintop. The last few murmurs quickly quieted, and he continued, “My brothers and sisters, what I will now do, no man could do alone. You might not think so, seeing me: you might think it effortless, that I snap my fingers and accomplish work that a dozen men would slave at all night. And so I tell you: this cannot be done unless I take on power that you give me. Power from your souls. I won’t take it from the unwilling. For it to be done — for all of us to continue on our journey, rich or poor, Northern or Southern, man or woman — all of us must make common cause. So it is with a train. So it is with the nation.

“I don’t ask this lightly. We will all feel the power drain from us. We might be weary, chilled, heartsick. But we’ll all be so equally, brother and sister Hyemi, one in sacrifice and one in the great deed. Will you give?”

“Aye, Land’s Own!” the merchant called out at once; and once he had, no other could remain silent. The crowd exploded in shouts of assent, and Detrich stood a while letting them do so, before beginning to move through to the front of the stopped train. Saul slunk off to the side, away from the push and noise, to where he saw a few others standing. Not Hyemi, he guessed from their look and dress, though they looked on with equal fascination.

“Imagine, if we had…” one woman whispered to another in Ilyigan, and he looked away before she could go on.

He watched. They all watched. Detrich came to stand before the swath of rubble where the landslide had deposited itself across the tracks. They saw him draw himself straight, dropping the crutch as he opened his hands at his side and drew in a breath. A rush of murmurs, sighs, and soft exhalations ran through the crowd; some women and older folk stumbled slightly, some paled, and a handful of men put their hands to their hearts. A baby squirmed in its mother’s arms and whimpered. But the rocks and the soil began to shift.

The earth itself seemed to shake itself clean, moving like the back of a great, slow creature. Heaving gently, boulders rolling aside, dirt draining away. The tracks showed through, at first twisted in places, then seemed to be combed straight by the same ebb and flow. In minutes — more than five, less than ten — the way stood clear, no traces left that it had ever been anything but.

Detrich turned back to face the exuberant crowd, who were cheering for each other as much as for him: men clasping each other’s shoulders, women hugging, soldiers laughing with children. He began, “This is your power —”, then nearly fell over as he reached down for his crutch.

Alarm raced through the passengers like wildfire. A handful rushed forward, and a woman with her two grown sons reached the Land’s Own first. She caught and balanced him while they put the crutch into his hand, and Saul was surprised to see Detrich’s look of open gratitude, as if his weakness and need were an obvious, meaningless thing.

“Fro Detrich,” the woman was saying, “take our power and fix yourself. We’re all glad to give it, my family here. Go on. You shouldn’t be in pain.”

Detrich smiled at her. Bright, open, honest, an expression unlike anything Saul had seen of him yet.

“You’re kind, Frowe,” he said, his hand on the woman’s arm. “But I can stand the pain. It’s not right, for the power of the people to go toward one man’s comfort. Not any man’s — not a minister’s, nor the Kaiser’s, nor even a Land’s Own Guardian’s.” His voice carried those words, and he added more softly, “And besides, it’s a small thing.”

The woman looked faintly let down, but nodded her understanding, and her sons appeared only all the more impressed. Folk began boarding again after that, and Saul hurried ahead to the compartment before anyone could question his right to go there. After a little while, Detrich came in and dropped down to sit on his bunk bed with a groan, looking worn out and decisively pleased with himself.

Saul looked at him sidelong. _A small thing_ , he thought, remembering the surgeon’s warning about being left crippled for life. “Can you really fix yourself?” he asked. “With power from souls?”

Detrich drummed his fingers on the table between them. “Yes and no. Not all at once, but I could heal a good deal faster, with no pain.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Didn’t I just explain it to the whole train? We won’t get very far if you don’t listen to me.”

Saul thought that saying none of that had made sense would make him sound like a fool. Instead he asked, “Can you heal others?”

“Sometimes. My Guardians, mostly. The power needs a fit channel, and space to pool in.” He gestured vaguely downward. “A Guardian’s Anchor and Centre provide those.”

The next answer was obvious, but Saul asked anyway. “Could you heal me?”

“You’re neither Hyemi nor a Guardian. But don’t mind it, lad.” Something of Saul’s disappointment must have shown in his face for all his effort, because Detrich continued with the same smile, bright and true, as he had given the woman and her family, “There are other ways to heal.”


	3. How Ash Feeds the Fields

The steps up to the front entrance to the imperial place were many, steep smooth marble, and the surgeon’s warning was clear in his mind. But there were worse fates than being crippled. And so Festus climbed them on his own two feet.

He’d been a touch surprised, and thus a touch wary, to learn that the Kaiser was waiting for him already. But it had been no secret that he was on the inbound train from Alsden, and no great surprise that Kaiser Freider had heard of his injury and wished to see him alive and well — or at least alive. Probably he would press him to rest. For his health, of course, not for anything to be gained from, however brief, freedom from his restless, relentless Land’s Own and his hundreds of wild designs. All His Imperial Majesty ever wanted was peace and quiet in which to sit and paint in his gardens. Festus might almost have sympathized, had the man not claimed by birthright a grip on the fate of nine million people.

Rest was not in his plans, though he was relieved when he was indoors and out of sight and could settle into the rolling chair again when a footman brought it up. Appearances aside — it was good for the Kaiser to see how gravely Adalas had wounded his Land’s Own — he knew that if he strained himself, Kirschen would be able to tell. And Kirschen did not deserve more worry. Festus had sent his lover, his good and loyal general, to the house with Saul to get the boy introduced and settled, and he wondered if he’d regret that. Saul had been awestruck by the train station; skittish, and angry to be so, at the crowds of the capitol. And during their three days of traveling, Festus had come to the curious realization that Kirschen and the Ilyigan boy had developed a mutual dislike that seemed bafflingly personal.

Well. Kirschen had worries enough already, and so did he, and Saul was for the moment the least of them. He muttered half thanks, half apology to the footman who pushed the chair through the palace, and tried to puzzle out how to compose himself when he was entering in such a strange way, and without a few moments of privacy outside the audience chamber’s door. The Kaiser was a little insult of a man, no one to fret over, but Festus had never felt at ease within these walls, where the mere gilding on the window frames could have fed his village for a year. The palace was a shadow of what it had been before the revolutionary army burned most of it down. But palaces, he had learned, were built on sturdy foundations.

They will listen to him. The Kaiser first, then Parliament. _You have the evidence of your own body. It will be enough._

“Sire — “ he began as soon as the footman opened the door, then abruptly stopped as he took in the room; that was his first mistake.

The Kaiser was not present: only the painted portrait of his long, unpleasantly pale face loomed from above the mantlepiece to mark his attendance in spirit. Otherwise the chamber was vacant but for one man, who stood up from behind a desk covered in carefully arranged papers to greet him. Sable haired and gray eyed, not tall, beautifully slender, noble bearing, noble mouth, noble eyes. Duke Emen Stattenholme, Chancellor of the Court, Speaker of the Upper House of Parliament, highest-ranked man in Hyem save the Kaiser himself. Or, at least, the highest-ranked man left, now that Festus was done with the rest.

“Land’s Own.” Stattenhome’s voice was crisp and clear and faultlessly polite. Just as faultlessly, he gestured for the footman to bring the rolling chair up to the desk, then dismissed him with a flick of his fingers. 

“Duke Stattenholme.” The chair was too low to let Festus properly see the papers on the desk without craning his neck too obviously. He kept his own voice level. “I was expecting His Majesty. I’ve been gone from the capitol two months.”

“His Majesty is indisposed. He knows you do not tend to quibble on court protocol,” Stattenholme said, and Festus just about stopped himself gritting his teeth, because the duke was right. “He is quite put out by this worry about war with Adalas,” he continued very smoothly, as though the words did not at once up-end all of Festus’s plans.

He couldn’t stare. Couldn’t show his shock, when to do so would be to all but admit that there had been a deliberate cover-up. But Festus had never been, could never be Emen Stattenholme’s match for such control. The faint upward sweep of Stattenholme’s brow showed as much. _Who was it?_ Not one of Festus’s own trusted soldiers. Impossible. All he could do was keep his own voice level. “The news traveled faster than I’d expected.”

“One must keep informed.”

“I meant to come to the Kaiser bearing all the evidence I had, for his consideration.”

“So I imagined.” Stattenholme glanced down at a paper, written in his own elegant hand with a seal of golden wax below. Some aristocrats earned the use of red wax through military service; the Kaiser had permitted Duke Stattenholme the use of gold as a substitute. “An Adalan gun. And what else?”

“We were less than twenty miles from the Adalan border.”

“I imagine the gun would have been difficult to smuggle further.”

“The gunman wasn’t Hyemi.” And then he made his second mistake, snapping at Stattenholme, “I wondered at first if he weren’t one of your sort, trying to undo the revolution.”

“Fro Detrich,” Stattenholme said softly, fingers laced before him on the desk, “even were one of my _sort_ so foolish, he would never have risked forcing the country into war.”

Festus didn’t flinch, didn’t shift his gaze. _Anyone who concerns me already knows exactly what I want._ He had known from the beginning that Stattenholme would be his greatest opponent, because Stattenholme had never been anything but. In Parliament, at the Kaiser’s right hand, he was as devoted to preserving the old order, his class of parasites living off the working people of the land, as Festus was to breaking them all to pieces. Noble Emen Stattenholme. Last of his noble house, now that Festus was done with the rest. 

But he’d meant for them to cross swords on more-even ground than this. With the Kaiser between them, as fearful, useless Freider often was; with the Prime Minister hanging on Festus’s words and all the information in Festus’s hands. When it was only he and Stattenholme, as it was here and now... Stattenholme had grown up politicking at his father’s knee, learning how to coax men to his will. Festus had grown up learning only how to coax scarce wheat from the haggard earth.

“What are you implying, Duke Stattenholme?” he asked bluntly.

Stattenholme took this in his stride, glacing dismissively down at his papers. “Nothing needs implying, Land’s Own,” he said as he leafed through the pile. “It seems obvious that some party with a vested interest in war could be behind this, and of course this cannot be risked. War is a beastly thing and the country needs it not at all, least of all to fall into it by manipulation.”

“I agree that there must be an inquiry.”

“There is one already.”

 _How long has he known?_ “Under whose charge?” 

“My own,” Stattenholme said, and slid a paper across to him without missing a beat. “You will further agree, I think, that an attempt on the Land’s Own Guardian’s life is too important an affair to delegate.”

Of course he could not rebut that. Festus skimmed through Parliament’s remit and quietly fumed all the while. _He’s been ahead of you for days, Detrich. You cannot play their games and you know it, and every time you think otherwise you prove yourself the fool._ “Ander Kirschen should assist you. He was there when it happened.”

“General Kirschen will testify before he departs. The Kaiser wishes him at the border, as a precaution.”

Not the Kaiser’s own idea, of course: much too sensible, much too precisely calculated. “What else is the Kaiser’s wish in this?” Festus asked, wishing he had Stattenholme’s gift for masking a sardonic tone as a satisfied one. 

“Peace, Fro Detrich,” the Duke answered; suddenly as blunt as a city wall. “The Kaiser’s wish is above all for peace. He has made his intent clear to both Houses of Parliament, that even should Adalas prove the culprit, Hyem will seek compensation through diplomacy.”

“Compensation! For trying to assassinate a Land’s Own!” 

“I should not try to sway his mind on the matter. Your own desires are already known; what I do not stoop to imply, others might.” 

A threat, laid bare and cold between them like a naked blade. Festus was stunned almost to the point of admiration. If Stattenholme had not been the Duke — if he had been any other man — 

A waste of time to even think of it. Their lives were what they were; other options had withered early on the vine. For the man that Emen Stattenholme was, the man that Festus was had nothing but hate. 

“Stattenholme,” he said with sudden, sincere heat, like throwing himself against a closed door. “Have your suspicions if you must. But if your inquiry confirms that Adalas is complicit, and you and the Kaiser let it lie, this country...”

He trailed off. Stattenholme was leaning forward a little in his seat, just a fraction. He could not attempt a show of physical presence, not even with Festus in the rolling chair: Festus was every inch a soldier, Land’s Own or no, and he had never held a sword. But he was Duke Stattenholme, and he had been born to everything that Festus had had to gain by the sword.

“Detrich,” Stattenholme said quietly, and the slip in etiquette was in itself like a slap to the face. “I am well aware that you and your dogs feel lost for lack of bloodshed to indulge in. Rest assured that I do not care one whit. You speak of this country; I serve it. And while I serve, there will be no war.”

And had Festus not been a soldier, with a soldier’s discipline, his power would have lashed out there and then against Stattenholme’s soul. He had every right, by the protocols in which the Duke was so well-versed. And Stattenholme would have had no choice but to bear it. _And he’d think he was right, then, calling you a dog._

Anything he might do or say would make for a worse defeat. Festus pushed his chair back from the desk, slowly, every inch bitter. Retreat, then. Regroup, reconsider. _Wait. Wait some more._

The footman who wheeled him back out was silent and nervous, though gracious when Festus offered apologies for making the poor fellow walk in on that ugly scene. “I understand, Fro Detrich,” the man murmured. “His Grace has that effect.”

That was something of a comfort. Rot Stattenholme and his talk of service. The people were with _him._ The thought came abruptly: _And you’ll give them war._ Saul’s face flashed in his mind, young and fine and wasted. _But you were born a farmer, and you know how ash feeds the fields._

He had enemies enough. No room and no time for doubt.

He wasn’t surprised to find that Kirschen wasn’t outside; he’d probably been called to be debriefed and to take up his new assignment. It was Major Gustav Basholme who was waiting by the door instead, who moved at once and without ceremony to clasp his arm, and for a moment Festus let himself be grounded by the sheer strength of his second greatest friend in the world.

Then he exploded: “Why didn’t anyone _tell_ me that Stattenholme’s spoken to Parliament?!”

Basholme snorted. Not very many people were inured to Festus’s temper when it flared, but the Major had more than enough of his own fire to match. “You’re one to talk. No word from you in two weeks. A man worries, Detrich!”

“You and Ander. Some men you are, you pair of nagging aunts! Did he fill you in?”

“The essentials. Gone poorly, has it?”

“Damned Stattenholme had me completely blindsided.” On a surge of fury Festus shoved himself up to his feet, grabbing his crutch from Basholme’s hands. At least Basholme moved straight to hauling the rolling chair down the palace steps without stopping to hover in concern. “He knew about the shooter, and he surmised all my moves from there. How did he know? And why wasn’t I told he knew the moment I stepped off the train?”

“No one had any idea,” Basholme answered, not apologetically, himself blazing with frustration. “Parliament met just yesterday, behind closed doors. Matters of state security.”

“And no one in the Lower House said a word to you? To my Guardians?”

Basholme’s lip curled in disgust. “Too scared to be found out, I suppose.”

“They’re not soldiers.” But inside he was howling with helpless rage. _How can I rely on men who aren’t soldiers?_ “It’s gone all to hell. Stattenholme’s in charge of the inquiry, and if I appeal to the Kaiser or to Parliament, he’ll spread rumours that I engineered the shooting myself as a casus belli. He’s all but said it to my face. Why did we let him live, Gus?”

“Lost track of his name on the lists, I suppose,” Basholme said, with a shrug that now did speak apology. “We’d killed so many other Stattenholmes.”

Another time, Festus might have grinned. But now he thought of the duke’s face as Stahhenholme quietly issued his threat, and he couldn’t find it in him.

They reached the street at the bottom of the staircase and the coach that waited there, one of Basholme’s men driving. “They’d called Ander to — ” Basholme caught the look in Festus’s eye and sighed, a growl in his voice. “You already know. But the duke can’t bury the damned inquiry. Even without you pushing for it yourself, people will want answers.”

“He can stall. Summer is practically over. By the time it’s campaigning season again, he’ll have spun some convenient story, or made overtures to Adalas, or the situation in Ilyiga will turn…” Settling back against the worn velvet of the coach seat, Festus rubbed at the knotted muscles of his bad leg and fought the urge to rub yet more fiercely at his eyes. No point in feeling tired when he already knew he’d not manage to sleep tonight. “I need to rethink this whole business. To start, tell my men to talk as they please. I want every soul in this city to talk about nothing but their Land’s Own being shot with an Adalan gun.”

“Stattenholme’s sure to expect that.”

“And sure to be helpless to stop it. He may have his grip on Parliament and the court, but the streets belong to _me_.” He was Land’s Own Guardian. If he could not be sure of his people’s love and faith, he could be sure of nothing else in the world.

Basholme nodded, looking pleased. “It’s a damned fine thing, some public outrage. Do them all some good. You’ll want to talk to your Guardians, I suppose — shall I take you home?”

“Would you? I left ten years’ worth of business on my desk alone.”

“And brought some more back with you, I hear.” Sharp humour gleamed in the major’s dark eyes. “Ander said the boy is about fifteen. Did you leave a gift with some Ilyigan woman back when you served in the borderland?”

“Did I — Sun’s sake, Gus.” Festus snapped out his uninjured foot to kick at his friend’s shin; Basholme roared with laughter when it connected. “Next you’ll say I’m swapping Ander for younger flesh.”

“Don’t. He’d say nothing, of course, but I’d snap your neck like a twig.”

“The lad’s a boy soldier from Tezzei. Gabrello Attoré made him a general, then got spooked by his skill and sent him into exile.” He answered Basholme’s doubtful look with a nod. “He’s better than you imagine. I’ve not seen even grown men move like that. It’s not every day one meets a sixteen-year-old boy with ten years’ experience on the field.”

“It’s never, if one’s lucky enough,” Basholme muttered. He shoved a finger into Festus’s chest. “Don’t you have enough on your mind without picking up Ilyigan strays? One boy general won’t turn the war.”

“It’s more than that. He has quick wits and learns fast. He speaks good Hyemi already. He asks good questions — daring questions.” They didn’t exactly ring hollow, those explanations, but Festus was forced to admit he did not quite know what they all came to. “He… caught my eye.”

Basholme looked at him. “A bright young thing, full of potential, forced to take up war and bargain away his future?” He leaned back in his seat and clasped his hands together across his belly. “I can’t imagine why.”

They reached the Land’s Own’s house in a less-than-easy silence, at least on Festus’s part; Basholme seemed perfectly content to sit, hum something bawdy, and let his words dig in with their little claws. Festus was relieved when they left the coach, Basholme pushing the chair, and came into the courtyard, but only briefly: almost as soon as they were past the gate, a figure sprang from the doorstep and hurtled at them. He barely had a moment to recognize his housekeeper before she nearly crashed into the chair.

“Fro Detrich! Finally!” She came to a scrambling halt, eyes wild, braids flying. He thought she was either excited or frightened, and both possibilities confused him, before he realized she was furious.

“What’s the matter, Frowe Weber?” he asked, even as Basholme rumbled a cheerful, “Hullo, Mia!”

Mia gave the major a look fit to skewer a man twice as tall. “I have a contract,” she snapped. “Nothing in that contract says I’m to look after children. Certainly not children who try to _stab_ me with my own scissors. Where did you _find_ that creature?”

Saul’s introduction had clearly been lacking. Festus spoke carefully, ignoring Basholme’s chuckles. “Did General Kirschen not explain…?”

“He said that boy — “

“You’re only three years older, frowe.”

“That _boy_ ,” Mia drew herself up, tall and aflame, “is an Ilyigan soldier, and I was told to be careful of his instincts. It wasn’t instinct he acted on. I told him his hair needed cutting. He was ready. I let my guard down like a fool, and he almost cut my throat!”

Festus risked a glance at Basholme, whose response was to ask: “Just almost?”

“I swung my bucket at his head. Then I ran.”

“There’s a lass.”

“He wanted a weapon,” Festus concluded in a low growl, as Mia finally tipped over from fury to leaning into Basholme’s embrace with a shudder. “And to intimidate you.” Like a hound in a new pack, or a wolf, acting swiftly to claim rank and terrorize all opposition. “I’ll make sure it never happens again. Come inside.”

An echo of fear flickered across Mia’s face, but not hesitation: both her own courage and her trust in him moved her resolutely to open the door. Loud clattering rang from deeper inside the house. Festus took up his crutch and hobbled down the corridor toward the kitchen. It sounded as though Mia had locked that door first thing, as Kirschen would have told her to do. And — sure as the sun rose in the east — he found Saul there, startled from working at the lock with the stolen scissors.

The boy glared up at him. Thoroughly clean, Festus noted with great approval, though of course his hair was still a bird’s nest and his face newly bloodied by Mia’s bucket. “How many times will I need to tell you to put down a weapon?”

Saul scowled. “Those are barely a toy.”

“A toy you can’t have. Give them back to Frowe Weber, and apologise.”

“What?”

“I think you heard me, lad.” Festus let his voice drop and cool considerably.

“That stupid girl — “

“That _woman_ will cook your meals, mend your clothes, and make you a good, clean bed to sleep in every night. You will respect that work and respect her, and regard her authority as my own.”

Mia was a little behind him, but he could just about catch sight of her sticking up her chin, fists tight at her side. Saul was looking at her with a helpless mix of anger and confusion. “And if I don’t?”

“You haven’t eaten yet, I see.” He gestured at the locked door. “And you won’t until she has your apology.”

The threat made the boy’s face lose colour. He was perfectly aware, Festus thought with satisfaction, that any meal he might eat without supervision would do him far more harm than good.

“I…” His grip on the scissors twitched. Festus didn’t move, only tilted his head a fraction in invitation and demand. Saul stewed helplessly for another long moment, his pallor giving way to a hot, humiliated flush.

With a snap like a gun going off he whirled around and stabbed the scissors deep into the wood of the door. Then he stalked off, shoving past all three of them, nearly knocking Festus off his one good foot. He stormed up the stairs and, the noise told them, into the guestroom. The door slammed thunderously behind him.

“Damn it to hell,” Festus said.

He sagged a little against the wall. Mia reached out to steady him, looking mildly scandalized to hear that from her Land’s Own Guardian. Basholme went to the door and managed to yank the scissors out on the second try. He turned back to Festus with a raised eyebrow. “So you’ve tired of falconry, and now it’s lion taming?”

“He’s only a boy.” That sounded stupid even to him. “He does what he knows how to do. He’ll learn. He wants badly enough to survive.”

Basholme looked unconvinced, Mia even more so. Festus put a hand on her arm. “Go stay with Alamann and his mother for a few nights. Paid leave, until I’ve made some progress here. We’ll be fine.” At her look of yet deeper doubt, he added, “I might forget meals, but he won’t.”

She knew him too well by now to truly try to dissuade him, but did nod haltingly at his leg. “Will you manage with this?”

“I have until now. Gus will come lend a hand if I need him.”

“Of course.” Baslhome grumbled under his breath. “What’s a cavalry major for, if not to play nursemaid and wet-nurse?”

“Land’s Own…” Mia’s voice dropped, a touch of hesitation as she invoked the title so rarely used by those who had the run of the Land’s Own’s house. “What happened to you? I read in the papers about your gun going off, but Alamann was saying that can’t be, that you of all people would never be so careless. And he’s right, isn’t he? I heard that Parliament had a closed session. Did someone try to — ?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Festus cut her off, and was pleased to see the new bloom of anger through the concern in her eyes. Bright Mia Weber relished the privileges of knowledge and insight that came with her position. And she knew him well enough to share his outrage at being so restricted. “But I’m sure the truth will out if you know who to ask. Gus, walk Frowe Weber to Fro Hirsche’s home, if you’ll be so kind.”

Basholme, moustache newly bristling in keen anticipation of intrigue, nodded once and offered Mia his arm. Once the front door shut behind them, Festus turned his attention to the staircase and what awaited above.

Damned Basholme’s damned words prickled at the back of his skull, pushing and pulling. He could vividly picture the boy in the room: Young, hungry, far from home, all the ways he had learned to survive now marking him out for a stranger. Full of a lost and suffocating rage. _Leave it, lad_ , another voice spoke in his mind: an echo of his own, but older, and unwelcome. _You know better. Things that break remain broken. And you have a war to fight._

He turned from the staircase, limped into the dining room, somehow managed to drag a chair from the table and put it by the locked kitchen door. He settled into it in careful silence, to think, to plan, to wait for the inevitable. 

* * *

The inevitable came creeping down the stairs half an hour past midnight.

Saul had made a number of aborted approaches during the afternoon, slinking down to the bottom of the stairway only to retreat at finding the kitchen door guarded. Festus thought of a tomcat warily testing another’s territory, and sat patiently, though not before fetching a stack of papers from his office to go through. They were endless. His secretary would have been a help, but Festus doubted he’d see him for some days to come: Alamann hadn’t Mia’s courage. It was himself and the boy, alone in an empty, locked house.

The ticking of the clock, and yellow lamplight thrown in strange angles across the walls and floor, filled the length of the corridor between them. Festus looked up, met Saul’s cold eyes, looked back down. And again. On the third such exchange he saw that Saul had inched half a step forward. Perhaps the boy hadn’t realized he’d done it.

Festus thought of cats again, ragged-eared village cats, half-wild, as prepared for a kick as for a morsel. He pulled himself up to his feet, unlocked the kitchen door, and stepped inside. He left the door ajar behind him.

Whisper-soft footsteps sounded from the corridor as he explored the shelves. A loaf of black bread, hard cheese, pickled onions in a jar. The door creaked open. Festus turned around with an open pot of blueberry preserves in hand. Pressed against the wall by the door, Saul stared, nostrils flaring, throat working.

Festus tipped his head toward the nearest stool, tucked under the table. “Sit down.”

Saul did, slowly, grudgingly. When he managed to tear his eyes away from the food, they kept drifting to the block of knives on the countertop. 

Festus sat himself on another stool across the table from the boy. He put the preserves down between them, open, with a spoon next to it. Saul tracked his every movement, but stayed still. Painfully still. He had put both hands flat between his knees and seemed to be clenching them there.

Festus let him sit for a while. A long while. The clock sang one hour past midnight. At last, he said, “This is my house, and my house has rules.”

Saul also lingered for some time. Swallowed hard. Finally nodded.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

The boy shifted on the stool. Resentment flickered into his eyes as he waved a hand at the pot on the table. “You said I won’t eat until I apologized to that girl. Now you’ve sent her away. What am I supposed to do?”

“You may write your apology. I’ll have it delivered to her.”

“I can’t write Hyemi.”

“It’s the same alphabet. Do your best, I’ll correct your spelling. You’ll need to learn.”

The resentment turned icy. “I’m not here to learn my letters. You said a war was coming.”

“In time.” Festus kept his voice level: no comment as for the war, or the plain fact that the boy was hardly in any condition for more than a quick tussle at the moment. “Learning is never wasted. Your letters. How to live here in Hyem. In my house. Respecting my people and rules.”

“She’s just a serving girl,” Saul growled. “Why should a soldier obey some woman?”

Festus snorted. “You aren’t a soldier.”

The look Saul gave him was of such outrage that Festus wondered if the boy expected the mere gaze to burn him to ashes where he sat. He continued with two raised fingers stabbing Saul’s way. “You can fight, that’s true; you may well be a prodigy. But you have no discipline, no patience, no mind for order or the greater picture. Those are what makes a soldier. At best you’re a warrior. At worst you’re just a brute.”

Saul snarled with rage, with a raw note of genuine hurt. “They called me a general. I commanded —”

“Children. Wild boys who knew nothing but raw strength. In my army, you wouldn’t have lasted a week.”

He watched the boy struggle. Heat had risen in his face again, his breathing came quickly, and one fist was curled tight on the table. But he had been backed into that corner that Festus knew so well, where to act on his fury was to confirm the truth of every insult that had triggered it. 

_Now we’ll see what he truly is._

Saul said, “I want to learn.”

It was no declaration of loyalty; but to Festus it rang clearer, truer. _Of course it does. And what do you imagine you’ll be teaching him, Detrich?_ He ignored that inner voice, and pushed the pot of preserves across the table along with its spoon.

Saul grabbed for it. He almost brought the pot up to pour its contents straight into his mouth, but managed to check himself at the last instant under Festus’s gaze. He began to devour great spoonfuls instead, a slight tremor in his hands that sent droplets scattering. Festus let him empty the pot. It was too small to strain Saul’s healing body, and a part of him wondered when Saul had last tasted anything properly sweet.

“Get me a knife,” he said after Saul was done, and the boy obeyed: he brought the large bread knife from the block and handed it over with only a little hesitation. Festus carved the bread and cheese slowly, taking care not to make the slices too large or too many. “These are the rules,” he said, handing slice by slice over as he spoke. “You are permitted no blade nor weapon unless I hand it to you myself. You fight when, if, and whomever I permit you to fight. You kill no one but by my explicit order. You respect and heed those who have earned my trust before you, man or woman, elder or younger, soldier or working folk. You may ask me any question, anytime, but I decide what answer you get. And when I command, you obey.”

He kept hold of the last piece of bread. Saul’s eyes darted to it, pupils flaring, but then his gaze rose again. Locked onto Festus’s own. “You get all that,” the boy said. “What do I get?”

“Food, shelter, time to recover — isn’t that enough?”

“I’m not just a brute,” Saul said quietly.

Festus breathed in. He handed the last slice over, and watched as Saul took it and held it, fingers shaking and mouth moving with open struggle, but holding otherwise still. Equally quietly, he said: “To be my soldier is to know that all your commands serve a worthy end.”

He did not know what such an end might be to the exiled Ilyigan boy. But Saul finally raised the bread to his lips and bit into it, twisting his head to tear off the bite.

They sat like that for a little while longer, Saul focused on chewing slowly, Festus on chasing back memories: comrades, brothers, dead men. He thought instead with relish that this entire exchange had in it something of the illicit. Already he was pushing the bounds of the law, never mind a Land’s Own’s acceptable conduct, by continuing to wear his uniform, by closely associating with officers, by aligning himself with and taking interest in the affairs of the army. And now here he was calling this boy his soldier. It was borrowing trouble, and his position was precarious as it was.

And yet.

“We’re done here,” he said when Saul had finished and sat licking stains of preserves off his fingers like a meticulous cat after a meal. “Go to sleep. We have work tomorrow.”

Saul got to his feet, went to the door with a nod and without comment. As he opened it, Festus couldn’t help but speak again: “You know, I almost expected you to have run off after fighting with Mia. You could’ve taken money, weapons… was it the hunger?”

The boy stopped, his back turned, half in the dim lamplight of the kitchen and half in the murk of the corridor. Something in his posture wavered. His voice, when he spoke, held a faintly thick note: “Where could I have gone?”

He waited for a beat of Festus’s silence, then went out into the dark.


	4. Either Way, Alone

Saul kept track of the days that followed mostly by mealtimes, which were exact to the first chime of the clock. Detrich was a functional eater and his fare was repetitious and dull, but always on time; and Saul began to learn the trick, when the hunger was too torturous, to focus on the time, until he could at least calm himself down from the worst of it by counting the hours and minutes. The first few days, he still found himself rattling the kitchen door half a dozen times. Detrich stopped him every time before he could do permanent damage to either that door or to himself. Once, seized by hideous frustration, he went at the man with his bare fists, only to find a dagger at his throat. Then Detrich used his crutch to crack him across both knees. The blow smarted so badly that Saul could barely walk for many hours. The Land’s Own seemed almost amused by this, saying now they could have a fair fight.

There was no fight. Saul dragged himself up to his room and stayed there until the next meal came along. The bed was the most comfortable he’d slept in in months, perhaps years. He slept. He slept a great deal.

Detrich kept busy at all hours: with paperwork, with the house, with meeting people of all sorts, soldiers, civilians, and Guardians. Something was always afoot. But Saul slept. There was no one to fight; there was nothing to endure. A dull malaise settled over his senses, like a fog over the sea, without direction or any beginning or end. Every time he awoke, he was in a strange land, at some stranger’s mercy. His instincts, growing keener as the terrible weakness of starvation slowly eased, jumped at shadows. But in those shadows there was nothing. He had no enemies. He had no weapon. He turned over and slept again.

It was late on the morning of the fourth day — or perhaps the fifth; he had begun to lose track — that he roused from an after-breakfast doze at the sound of Detrich slowly climbing up the steps. Detrich appeared at the door, took a surveying look of the room, and scowled.

“This room stinks.”

Saul half sat up in bed and glanced around. He saw nothing of interest, but Detrich came in and started poking about the dirty plate and mugs on the bedside table, the rumpled bedclothes, the few clothes strewn across the floor. “And _you_ stink. Get up and clean yourself up,” the Land’s Own demanded, looking viscerally repulsed.

“I washed the other day — “

“The other day was four days ago.”

Was it really? “I was tired.”

“Of what? What have you done this whole week?”

Saul hesitated, then sketched a shrug. _What does it matter?_

Detrich narrowed his eyes, and something in his face hardened. He rapped the tip of his crutch against the floor. “Get up,” he barked, and, when Saul stretched idly, snapped like a whip cracking: “ _Up!_ Half an hour: make the bed, wash the dishes, clean this place up, get dressed, and report down to the courtyard. You’ll bathe after drills. If your work is sloppy it’s half-rations at lunchtime. You want to be a soldier? Let’s see how you survive one day’s routine of officers’ school.”

For a moment Saul could only stare at him. Then the crutch struck thunderously against the floor again, and a ripple seemed to go through the very foundations of the house. He rolled out of bed and scrambled to collect his clothes under Detrich’s implacable glare.

He was late to the courtyard. Sitting in the shade, cleaning a selection of guns, Detrich made him run ten laps just for that, then twenty more as what he called a warmup. Half a dozen sorts of exercises followed under the merciless late-summer sun. Then Saul stood at attention in that sun while Detrich inspected his cleaning, only to come back disappointed and order the chores done over. It was more than another hour before he was satisfied with Saul’s work, and lunch was late on top of being half-rations. A cold bath followed, and then he sat Saul down in his office to struggle his way through a book in Hyemi. In the hours before dinner, Detrich went through a stack of papers two inches high, and Saul through maybe four pages. Then more dishes, and cleaning work about the yard —

“What does this have to do with being a soldier?!”

“It has to do with obeying orders.”

And by the time Saul finally fell into his impeccably made bed, he was tired enough to make up for well over a week of inaction.

He dreamed that night, for the first time he could remember since leaving Alsden. Dreamed of the day the militia had come into the great temple of Tezzei to take its glass-and-gold sunburst, taller than a grown man. Clearly saw, in the dream, the agony on his grandfather’s face and the faces of what few city elders who still lived, to see the symbol of the faith taken down, shattered and melted down to pay for guns. But he dreamed also of the first of those new guns being put into his hands, the marvel of its weight, its cold power.

He was deep in the dream when Detrich shook him awake at the very crack of dawn and set him to do every chore and drill all over again.

The days fell into unrelenting routine, constant and bloody-minded. Morning, inspection and report on the previous day’s activities. Whatever breakfast his performance earned, then drills in the yard — always to the very limit of Saul’s slowly improving stamina, but never with any weapon. Bath, then the midday meal. Then study, the worst time by far, squinting over the insanity of Hyemi spelling, or over maps of a world whose size he could barely comprehend. All while Detrich sat with his own papers and muttered obscure comments as he worked, all in the same theme of costs and laws and _how much bread could this buy? How much timber? How many guns?_ These mutters showed more emotion than the Land’s Own ever showed Saul directly. Often that was anger. Sometimes it was something raw and almost pleading. But it meant nothing to Saul either way.

The meetings stopped. No one came by the house now; there was nothing of the outside world to occupy Detrich’s attention. However engrossed he became in his work, he never once failed to notice Saul idling or dozing off or, desperately, trying to sneak out of the office for another attempt at the kitchen door. Nights were just as hopeless a cause. Saul ended every day by collapsing into bed, frustration fighting with weariness and losing every single time. But he never saw Detrich sleep.

Perhaps he didn’t sleep. Perhaps it was a Land’s Own’s power. Or perhaps it was only Detrich: unrelenting, constant and bloody-minded.

On one such day, one like all the others, Major Basholme appeared at the door with provisions, which immediately gained Saul’s interest, and news, which immediately lost it. Detrich sent him up to his room with a book while he and Basholme spoke in the locked office, but all Saul could think of was the loaf of fresh bread the Major had brought. He could imagine its smell wafting up to him through the floorboard. He tried to distract himself by listening — Detrich and Basholme having some argument, Basholme growling something about how the Land’s Own could only be so patient for so long — but his mind could go nowhere that his stomach couldn’t pull it back from. After what seemed like a lifetime of struggle, he threw the book out through the open window and tiptoed down the stairs.

All was still on the ground floor, no movement and no sound. Basholme’s coat and hat were gone from the coat-rack by the front door, and the office door was ajar. The Major must have left without Saul hearing. But when Saul rattled the lock between him and all the promise of the kitchen, he heard nothing from the office in response.

He rattled the lock again. Nothing. He raised a foot to kick the door, then stopped. He really _could_ smell the bread. But he could also smell a trap.

Fighting his body every step of the way — not his body, his soul, as if the difference mattered, as if one was better or worse than the other — he crept up to the office door. Pushed it open inch by inch. Still nothing but silence. He eased the opening wider until he could slip in.

Detrich was alone, sitting in the great armchair that filled the room’s far corner, fast asleep.

Blood suddenly hammered into Saul’s heart and head. As careful as he had ever been on the killing field, he inched his way forward. Detrich slept with the stillness of a marble statue. His deep, even breathing was totally silent, his face smooth without any hint of its normal blazing animation. His hands lay flat on the arm rests, bad leg stretched out, the crutch just barely within reach.

His dagger was on the desk.

Saul had meant to look more about the room, but once he saw the weapon he saw nothing else. Barely a handspan of metal, useless in most hands. But his hands were different from most.

And Detrich was asleep. He _did_ sleep. Like any man. And like any man, he could bleed.

Saul crept closer, closer. Set his feet on either side of Detrich’s legs, leaned in. Up close, he could see the ghost of a frown on the Land’s Own’s face, the bruised shadows under his eyes, faint lines about the brow, the mouth. Saul couldn’t judge his age, but he suspected it was younger than he’d first thought. The dagger whispered glittering against the black of Detrich’s beard. One cut. One movement. He would never even awaken to realize he was dead. And Saul would be —

 _Free_ , said his gut; _doomed_ , said his mind.

Either way, alone.

Saul never moved, not a twitch or a tremor. But abruptly he was looking into the ocean-deep blue of Detrich’s open eyes.

“Well?” the Land’s Own said.

He’d been awake all this time, from the moment Saul had entered the room. The sharpness made that clear. Saul half-stumbled, half-scrambled backwards, though he’d had the movement ready, though he’d held Detrich’s life in his hands.

He snapped, “Don’t you ever sleep?!”

Detrich let his head drop back, closed his eyes again. He sounded infinitely weary. “I try to.”

The sound threw Saul off balance almost as much as finding the man seemingly asleep had, for all that he still held the dagger. It hung, awkwardly limp, from his hand. He studied Detrich again, the slump of his shoulders against the armchair’s embrace. Of course he was a man who slept and bled. It was easy to see, when Detrich let it be seen…

Detrich spoke without opening his eyes. “You want the bread, don’t you?”

Saul wavered.

He found himself saying, “Why are you so tired? All you do is read papers and talk with people.”

 _And torment me_. That went unspoken, though the sudden faint perk of one corner of Detrich’s mouth told him the Land’s Own echoed the thought. _I might’ve killed you for it_. Detrich hadn’t even demanded his dagger back. Saul shifted in place, and then shifted again.

He turned and put the dagger back on the desk, exactly where it had been.

Detrich eased himself forward in the armchair and nodded him at the desk chair. They sat facing each other.

“What do you know about politics here in Hyem?”

It was not what he had expected, not remotely; and yet, creeping through the cracks in his suspicion, Saul saw the beginning of an explanation. For Detrich’s exhaustion, for the long days spent shut up inside the house, maybe even for what frustration the Land’s Own was venting by training him as strictly as he did. _I should’ve put a blade to his throat sooner._

But he had put that blade away. And now Detrich was looking directly at him, eye to eye. 

He thought slowly, feeling half in the dark but determined to make the best of what he was finally being given. He’d heard things in the borderland, and in Alsden, and Detrich had answered a slow but steady drip of questions over the past days. Saul had even picked up a thing or two from all those books and maps. “There’s the Kaiser, and he and the nobles used to rule everything. Then two years ago you had a revolution, and now there are common folk in Parliament.”

“My revolution.” Detrich’s voice was deep and rich with satisfaction. “Parliament has two houses now, Upper and Lower, and any man can vote and stand for the lower. Not perfect, not finished, but some progress. I had thought I would head the Lower House. I was willing to give up my uniform for it.”

“But instead you became Land’s Own Guardian.”

The satisfaction was instantly gone. “Yes.”

Detrich leaned further forward, raised his hand to rub his eyes with its heel in an unthinking gesture. Saul watched him sweep his fingers back through his loose hair. “As a soldier, a fighting man… nothing was ever straightforward or simple, never believe that. But power was power. And I was what I was. Now… for war to be declared, the Kaiser has to order it himself, or the two Houses of Parliament can force his hand if they act in concert. The Land’s Own has no authority. I can’t do anything with the Kaiser — he hardly cares how the country is run, but he’ll never do as I say. Both Houses are split on the issue. I can sway the Lower, since the majority party is mine, and I can whip the others into line together with the Prime Minister. But the Upper is led by my enemy. And now he has put a process in motion in both Houses that would take all winter, at least. Do you follow?”

“It isn’t hard.” Now that Saul thought about it, he’d seen factions in Ilyiga play the same games, when they decided for some reason to make up rules to follow other than the rule of steel. “So what are you doing about it?”

“Testing my ground, for the most part. Finding my leverage. To directly disrupt proceedings, to play politics in Parliament, is to fight on my enemy’s territory. But there are other forces on the field, and some of them hold him in as much contempt as he holds me. Things might simmer over the winter just as easily as they might blow over. If I can keep some control. If I can be patient… no one believes I can be patient…”

He trailed off, looking halfway thoughtful, half, again, deathly tired. Saul found himself also leaning a little forward where he sat. It was eerie to hear all this from the man to whose throat he had just held a knife. He barely understood why Detrich was speaking to him this way. But he understood that he was now hearing things no one else, not even Basholme, had.

“I hardly expect it to be easy,” Detrich muttered, eyelids heavy, hands closing about the ends of the armrests. “But for once — for once, not to have to struggle for every step. Every scrap. I’m Land’s Own Guardian, and still everything must be a war.” A wry grin turned his mouth only halfway up. “War is the only way anything ever gets accomplished.”

He fell silent then. His eyes drifted shut, his breathing evened, though now Saul recognized the deliberate, grasping bid for rest for what it was. He looked at his benefactor and saw: a mighty power hemmed in, removed from the battles it knew, fighting against a fog that wore at it day by day. Full of a lost and suffocating rage. 

He glanced from Detrich back to the table, the dagger.

 _I wouldn’t have done it._

The words stopped on his lips. Detrich had already known; surely, he would never have let him come so close otherwise. Somehow he had known, when Saul himself had not.

It felt almost like trust.

Letting go of that first thought, he warily said, “You promised me that war.”

Detrich opened his eyes with a much more familiar look of detached exasperation, instantly grounding the moment. He grumbled, “If I can be patient, then so can you. You’re hardly fit for the field yet, anyway. Don’t you have a chore to be at?”

“Can I have some of the bread first?”

“I’ll think about it once you’ve run twenty laps for taking up a weapon without permission.”

Saul swallowed, stood up, and saluted. “Yes, sir.”


	5. Courage, Glory, Homeland

On the twelfth day, by Saul’s uncertain reckoning, Detrich finally called his household staff back. He greeted them both at the door, and made Saul come do the same, though with rather less warmth. Saul spared barely a glance for Alamann Hirsche, despite the sallow, sickly young man’s look of good-natured fascination. He was more interested in trading banked glares with Mia, who seemed to have forgotten not a single detail of their first altercation. The housekeeper had no bucket now, and he had no stolen scissors. Their eyes had to do.

“If this is how it’s going to be,” Detrich said, looking from one to to the other and back again, “then I’m going back to bed.”

He did no such thing, of course, and not only because he had not spent the night in his bed to begin with. Instead he led Mia and Alamann into his office, with Saul trailing behind to listen, and questioned them at great length about the mood of the city. What folk said in the streets, in their cups, in whispers far away from Parliament and the wealthy quarters. Both of them told the same tale: The capitol was thrumming with rumours about the treacherous Adalans’ attempt on the Land’s Own Guardian’s life, and Detrich’s near-two weeks of seclusion had only brought those to a fever pitch. Speculation ran rampant about his injury and his condition. In one beer hall, Mia reported, drunken soldiers had been thrown out forgetting rowdy while singing songs from the last border war.

The tale made the dark blue of Detrich’s eyes gleam like gunmetal. He turned to Saul and said, “Get dressed. We’re going to the market.”

“Dressed” meant an outfit that Alamann had brought, borrowed from a younger relative, cut in the Hyemi fashion. The shirt clung to Saul’s shoulders, and the high-waisted trousers were awkward to move in when he was used to the low-slung and loose Ilyigan style. He lingered in his room, staring back and forth between the sober black and cream now clothing him to the little pile of faded rust, mustard, and sky-blue on his bed, until Detrich’s impatient call from downstairs snapped him back to the familiar need to keep moving.

Detrich wore his uniform as always, but had plaited his hair into a queue that started high on the back of his head and fastened it with a length of red leather. It reminded Saul of an illustration in one of his books of a warrior from the steppes. It made him arrestingly handsome. Over Mia’s faint protests he left the crutch and rolling chair behind and took up the large black cane he’d used to subdue Saul in Alsden. The wood visibly bore the notch from Saul’s knife; as they sat in the carriage together, Detrich ran a finger over it and grinned oddly in satisfaction.

Saul only half looked at the cane. He was too busy taking in the Hyemi capitol. It was the largest city he’d ever seen in which nothing was burning.

It was market day. Even the most scarred of Ilyigan towns had those now and then, though the hubbub here was both more vibrant and more serene. The Hyemi went about their business with nary a glance over their shoulders, absorbed in lives uninterrupted, lingering by brimming stalls to pick the finest produce. They haggled in high tones and in good humour. The crowd was dressed in plainer colours, mostly in the same sober monochrome that Saul now wore, but the market a hundred times richer in the fat days of summer’s end. Detrich’s limping pace was perforce slow, but Saul fell into lockstep just behind him, and drifted through the market as though in a dream.

The market leapt at him in suffusing flashes. Crimson and purple berries, apples scarlet and green piled into bright little mountains in their wooden crates. A whole side of beef suspended from a shopfront hook, marbled with white fat. Sparks of sunlight thrown at the eyes from the polished goods in an ironmonger’s stall. Flowers in women’s hair. Baked goods on a tray showed intricate patterns, plaited, knotted, and latticed in hypnotic detail. A singing child spinning a hoop, with a fat dog traipsing along beside. The people’s accent was different here, and they spoke too quickly, too loudly for him to understand. 

He’d seen it all before, he thought, for all that the clothes and many of the foodstuffs were strange. Even in the most scarred Ilyigan town, people still bought and sold, crafted and ate. But it were as if someone had taken his memories and painted them huge, in dizzying hues, strangely tinted by the different quality of the Hyemi sunlight.

Like it or not, his saving grace was that all activity stopped and all attention shifted wherever Detrich went. Like the passengers on the train, folk in the market turned to their Land’s Own Guardian like sunflowers tracking the daystar, and glowed just as brightly.

“Fro Detrich, it’s good to see you!”

“Land’s Own, Sun bless!”

“It’s been rumoured —”

“We’ve heard —”

“Adalas —”

“Are you well? Land’s Own, you’re injured, who would dare?!”

“I can’t speak of it — I’m sorry, fromen, not even a word.” Detrich raised a hand to still the pressing crowd just as Saul was beginning to twitch. “Parliament is deliberating. The Kaiser will decide what is meet for you to know. I have no authority there.”

The crowd shifted and murmured amongst themselves. An air of palpable outrage began to quietly steam from them, though Saul also saw a few who responded with crossed arms and snorts of amusement.

“Can’t say a word,” one woman holding a butcher’s cleaver murmured to her seamstress neighbour. “The Kaiser will decide — can you believe it?”

The other shook her head. “The revolution is over,” she said, her voice lower. “It can’t be as it was then. If Fro Detrich defies Parliament openly… one revolution was enough."

After a short time, they began to move along through the parting crowd, though murmurs, talk and calls continued behind and around them. Saul found himself distracted from the fascination of the stalls and shops by the ongoing flow of conversations around him: the quick chatter of market Hyemi, the hushed exchanges. An ugly language, he thought, stark and guttural next to the fluid music of Ilyigan, but he listened closely anyway, trying to parse the impression that the Land’s Own’s scarce words had left in their wake. 

“Is this how you’re going to start a war?” he murmured to Detrich as they walked. “Just by speaking to people in the market?”

“How do you think any war starts?” Detrich murmured back, and Saul realised he’d never given it any thought.

The scents of half a hundred kinds of food, familiar and unfamiliar, spun his mind away from thoughts of war again. They passed another stall of elaborate baked goods, and one of skewered sausages, and one of potatoes fried in goose fat. Detrich stopped and talked to the vendors about prices and supplies and the changing season, but he spent not a single rusted coin. All he did was shake his head at Saul: “Too pricey.” “No need.” “The larder at home is full.” For a while Saul considered it some fresh torment to add to his training, but after some time they came to a stall selling exotic fruit, where the vendor boasted of fare “from every shore of the Inner Sea, from across the Southwest Passage and the Great Dzirinian Plains.” Many were as advertised: whimsical shapes, vivid colours. But one small pile, Saul recognized, and saw that Detrich did as well.

“Blood oranges,” the Land’s Own said, his voice soft and strange.

The vendor nodded proudly. “From Stadtgard, orangery-grown. The match of any from Ilyiga.”

Saul snorted in doubt, but Detrich reached out until his hand hovered just above the largest of the pile. “The graf who taxed my village used to import them for his wife,” he murmured. “I can’t guess what they cost, but every year, the gräfin must have her oranges. They came by the main road, and every year some would spoil on the way, and we would run behind the cart… we said, ‘Of course these are food for a gräfin.’ Even spoiled, they tasted like gold…”

He pulled his hand back.

“Take one, Land’s Own,” the vendor said, low and encouraging. “At my expense. You should know what they taste like unspoiled.”

Saul watched, his mouth watering desperately despite himself. The struggle on Detrich’s face was stark and open. But he shook his head. “I really cannot. It’s your livelihood, frowe, and I’m fed perfectly well at the table of the state.”

He turned away. Saul stared at his back, but the vendor didn’t argue, only sighed. “Forget it, lad,” she told him. “Fro Detrich pours out charity like well-water, but his own purse is tighter than a royal daughter’s privates. A shame. Just the sight of him enjoying one of those would’ve sent half the market to my stall.”

Saul swallowed. “What about the sight of someone with him?”

The vendor considered this for a minute, one long enough to make Saul fear that any moment Detrich would look back at him or call him back to his side. She slowly looked him over and said, “You’re Ilyigan, aren’t you? The south coast?”

“Yes. Tezzei.”

He did not know why that was what tipped the balance at last. But the vendor gave a sudden, crooked smile, picked an orange from the pile, and dropped it into his nearly trembling hands.

“Don’t let him see, or he’ll make you give it back,” she whispered to him. “But I can sometimes afford charity, too.”

Saul tucked the orange into his shirt. His heart hammered against it for a while, but for once, Detrich was occupied enough to be less than all-seeing. They had a handful more exchanges like the first, the market folk stopping their Land’s Own to ask the same questions and receive the same non-answers, and to murmur displeasure in much the same way. At last they turned a corner into a side street, and came upon a beer hall with a shaded garden, crowded with young men and women. The men were soldiers on leave, Saul knew at once, though he didn’t think the girls were whores, which left him uncertain and suspicious of their company. Here and there older veterans sipped from their own mugs and indulged in snapping self-indulgently at their juniors.

They rose to their feet when Detrich entered, all of them to a man. Here it was not “Land’s Own”; here it was “Rittmeister Detrich.”

“None of that.” He raised a hand to silence the salutes, and gestured up and down his current uniform with a bitter curl up of his mouth. “This is only for old times’ sake.”

The salutes yielded to laughter. The crowd parted to let them through to a vacant table, where Detrich dropped into a chair with a sigh and lay his cane on the tabletop. He flicked a hand at Saul to direct him to stand at his back — and listen, no doubt, though Saul’s initial attention was drawn much more strongly to the Hyemi soldiers. Sun’s blood, they were clean. All of them had a full kit of uniform, and regulation weapons at their hips. They smelled of shaving soap and boot polish, and the girls looked at them adoringly.  _ They look like painted figures in a book.  _ But their guns and swords were real.

“What are  _ you _ looking at, boy?” one of the men — only a few years his elder, Saul thought, not much older than the thug he’d killed in Alsden — asked roughly, while Detrich was busy fielding the usual questions with the usual response. Saul measured him with a deeper look. He had a sword, but not the space to unsheathe it. His uniform collar was loose enough to offer a grip. On the table right next to him was an empty glass mug. 

The other consideration was the orange still tucked inside his shirt, too precious to risk in a tussle. He asked, “Have you ever been in battle?”

The soldier’s unimpressed look turned into a sneer. “Every man in this hall fought in the revolution. We remade this country. Where did Fro Detrich pull you out of that you don’t know — wait.” He squinted at Saul. “You’re not even Hyemi, are you?”

“No. Ilyigan.”

“Hm. He has his reasons, I suppose. Listen and learn, foreign squirt. We are the army of the people.”

“What does that mean? You fought the Kaiser’s army?”

“It means we beat the Kaiser’s army. And quick, too, no years of civil war for  _ us _ .”

The ring of shattering glass cut through every other conversation in the hall. Saul was swinging the mug’s broken half before his mind quite caught up with his hand. The soldier scrambled desperately out of his range —

Steel closed on his wrist. Detrich, turned around in his chair, pulled his arm back and slammed his hand against the tabletop littered with razor-thin shards.

“None of  _ that, _ ” he said, calm and deep as the summer ocean.

Saul’s hand opened, nerveless and stinging with a dozen points of needle pain. He dropped his gaze, remembering, _no blade nor weapon, you fight when, if, and whoever I permit,_ too late. _I didn’t mean_ _to._ The realization was itself a shock.

The soldier looked ready to crow at him, but froze under the gaze of his Land’s Own Guardian, dropped his own eyes in chilled shame. “Not from you, either,” Detrich went on, lower but sharper. “Karlsen, isn’t it? Mocking a refugee lad, half a dozen years your junior? You embarrass this company. Restrain yourself. And hold your boasts. The army has accomplished great things, but its work is far from finished.”

Murmurs broke anew through the silence, assent and curiosity. Karlsen melted shamefaced into the crowd. Detrich at last released Saul’s wrist and studied his bloodied hand with minute displeasure. “Nothing too bad. Go get that cleaned up, and tell them to feed you something.”

As simple as that, dismissal and reward.  _ He isn’t angry _ . Confusion wrestled with hunger and hunger won out, and Saul let one of the girls take him into the kitchen in the back of the hall, where she gave him a baked apple pasty to eat while she cleaned and bandaged his hand.

She winced as she worked the slivers out of his skin. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

Saul shrugged. Busy with the pasty, he’d barely even noticed her ministrations.

In the main hall, the conversation had resumed. A young voice was asking, with a touch of wariness and a touch of eagerness, what the Land’s Own meant by the work of the army. Should the soldiers of Hyem be preparing for anything?

“Ask Duke Stattenholme,” Detrich answered, which raised some protests. He continued, “The army should always be prepared. The revolution’s forged us stronger, and got rid of most officers who’d held their posts for nothing but status and vanity. But it cost us, too, and the nations around us know it.”

“What more could Adalas want from us?” Another, bitter voice rose. The girl, who had been listening with half an ear, paused in her work with a look of sudden suspicion.

“You aren’t Adalan, are you?” she asked Saul.

He shook his head. “I’m Ilyigan.” How strange that no one could tell.

Her eyes widened. “Were — were you in the civil war?”

_ Everyone’s in the war.  _ Maybe the Hyemi couldn’t understand it. “I was a unit commander.”

The shock in her gaze flickered, became shaded with doubt.

In the main hall, Detrich was speaking. “— mistake to think only of Adalas. The whole continent must see that Hyem is strong and cannot be toyed with. If that means establishing ourselves through war —”

“How old are you?” the girl asked.

“Sixteen.” He pulled back a little even though she was still tying off the bandage, eager to turn back to the main hall. Why was she taking so long…

Her hand twitched against his. “Younger than my little brother.” She was pressing her palm over the back of his hand for some reason, seeming not to realize that that made the cuts sting worse.

In the main hall, someone was saying “— don’t know that we can afford a war. The revolution did cost us.”

Someone else snorted. Not Detrich. An older man’s voice. “If we take control of trade on the Essine, the war will pay for itself.”

“Let it cost us if the money goes to railroads,” said a woman now. “You young ones don’t know it, but it’s the last war got the Alsblich line built. And the steel mills at Breiden, too.”

“They’re right,” the girl still clinging to Saul’s hand muttered. “It’s time we hit back at Adalas and took what’s ours. But I’m glad you’re too young to be fighting again…”

It clicked. Saul yanked his hand back, incredulous at her look of sudden hurt as he did.  _ I’m only a boy to her _ .

It wasn’t his pride that smarted. He knew his own power, and she had never seen him on the field. Nor had the soldier who’d mocked him before. Neither mockery nor pity meant a thing. But he felt eerily detached from the very earth he walked on as he headed back into the main hall. No one here knew him. No one here  _ knew _ . Even when they talked about war, the Hyemi were foreign.

The girl followed him. Detrich, who was listening intently to a wizened old veteran saying something about river warfare, looked up and gave her a nod and a smile of thanks. She flushed, but seemed to gather courage, as she then wove her way to his table. The patrons moved to let her approach, curious; the hall’s serving girls had mostly stayed quiet, and she, too, still visibly struggled to collect herself before speaking up. Detrich nodded at her again, inviting, and at last she softly said: “It seems to me that… well, to speak of war as though it costs only money is… not right. Even in the revolution… so many good souls passed from this earth. All you good fromen, if there is war… how many of you won’t ever come back to drink here again?”

Silence met those words, a sober, sombre silence. The girl seemed unnerved by that response. Her eyes clung to Detrich’s face, asking. “Land’s Own — I know that, I didn’t, that is — “

“You aren’t wrong, frowe.” His voice was low, and soft, and still carried all across the crowded hall.

The silence as a whole turned on him now. Detrich looked from face to expectant face, down at his hands on the table, then up at his people again. “No one goes to war for love of war. Just as no one lances a wound, or turns the hard soil, for the love of it. I know the price of war. I served. I fought, lost comrades, suffered pain — hideous pain.” One hand moved to touch his back, with a grimace of memory. “But I healed, and grew stronger and wiser. As a wound heals after lancing to heal, and as wheat grows after the soil is turned. Will there be war? Ought there be? I cannot say. I cannot begrudge you praying otherwise. But as Land’s Own Guardian to Hyem, I say Hyem can heal, Hyem can grow. Hyem holds her good souls within her, that gave her so much, and they are never gone from us here.”

There once more fell silence, but abruptly a voice broke right through it, clear and bright and piercing. One of the young men had begun to sing.

Within three notes, it was an avalanche of voices. Cacophonous, boisterous, fervent. Men and women banged out the rhythm with hands on thighs and feet on stone. In the commotion, Saul understood three words in ten. But those words rang again, again.  _ Courage. Glory. Hyem. _

Cheers erupted on the finish, and redoubled when the proprietor declared a free round of drinks for the good soldiers of Hyem. Detrich accepted a mug with the rest, though was slower than most in draining it. Someone even thrust a frothing drink at Saul, with some laughter from the soldiers and speculation on how a foreigner might stomach strong Hyemi brew. Some of them tensed when he shoved it back, but one said, “Never mind, he’s only a lad.”

Detrich seemed thoughtful when they left the hall, though subdued in a way that left Saul wary. “The good soldiers of Hyem,” he mused as he led Saul back toward the main street. “She spoke well, that girl, about how many would not return. Women always see it clearer. But if they don’t understand the cost, at least I hope they see what’s to be gained…” He paused and looked at Saul strangely. “None of that means a thing to you, does it.”

Saul shrugged. He still felt unmoored, but this offered sure ground. “Do I need to? War is war.”

Detrich opened his mouth to respond, then suddenly smiled, glum and skull-like. “Yes.”

Somehow, that seemed to move him to satisfaction. He quickened his pace as much as his bad leg would allow, and spoke lower but more certainly as they wove back into the market crowd. “They’ll call me an agitator, but I  _ am  _ the Land’s Own. It’s clear where the will of the people stands. When the Upper House — “

He stopped sharply, stopped speaking, turned his head to glance over his shoulder. Saul followed his gaze backward. A carriage was rattling down the street, forcing the crowd apart. Two glossy black horses with silver-wrought gear, a glossy driver in black and silver idly flicking his whip at the slow or the staring.

Detrich turned around and stood his ground.

The groom’s face changed to see him: wariness, displeasure, but also a kind of resigned respect. The horses slowed, then halted altogether, and did not resume their pace even as Detrich moved around, Saul driven by curiosity to keep at his heels, and stood by the side of the carriage to look up at its window. To look at the heavy drapes — black trimmed with silver — as though they were no barrier at all.

The carriage door opened. A man leaned out of it without descending, fine-boned and well-dressed, with curling hair as black and glossy as his livery. When his eyes met Detrich’s, every soul in the market was looking on with held breath.

“Duke Stattenholme,” Detrich said.

“Land’s Own.” The man’s tone was as smooth, as bland as the rice porridge that Saul had grown heartily sick of. He raised his gaze above Detrich’s head to survey the crowd. “The people must be pleased to see you out and about at last.”

“Very much so. I can tell you what that’s like, if you ever come to wonder.”

“I have better business than trading insults in the marketplace,” Duke Stattenholme said with a serenity that made the muscles in Detrich’s tight jaw stand out. “The Kaiser is surprised that you have not yet come to make your testimony to the Board of Inquiry.”

From inside the carriage, slipping out through the open door, a sound drew Saul’s attention. Something like a mewling, and the whisper of a woman’s voice. He leaned a little forward, trying to hear and see.

Detrich tapped the cast on his leg with his cane. “Tell the Kaiser I was ordered to stay home and recover. The surgeon wasn’t pleased with how this was healing.”

“Oh — not a small thing, then?”

“Better than a gunshot wound, I grant you. Doubly so from a gun that killed a horse at five hundred yards.”

“Save it for your testimony, if you will,” Duke Stattenholme said, still mild. “The Kaiser is adamant that he be first to have the facts. Not the market, nor the papers, however that must be made certain.”

Detrich tapped the cast again with a growl. “Shall I pretend this is a fashionable new boot, too?”

“Alas, you know too little of fashion to make that convincing.”

The mewling from inside the carriage sharpened, became a gasping little wail. The woman’s voice rose in turn, murmuring and humming. Saul could just see a pale hand. The glint of a dark eye turned his way.

“Your diligence in the inquiry serves the Kaiser well, I’m sure.” Detrich spoke flatly, a tightly compressed kind of flatness. “Tell him I’ll come tomorrow. Today I also have business. It’s been some eight weeks, and the people  _ are _ pleased to see me.”

“Tomorrow, then.” Duke Stattenholme somehow inclined his head without lowering it. As he did so, his awareness fell on Saul, sudden and sharp. Startled from trying to catch sight of the carriage’s other occupants, Saul looked right back into the Duke’s gray eyes. Stattenholme’s brow furrowed very slightly. He pulled back into the carriage, and shut the door.

The driver flicked the reins, and the horses began to move. But just as the carriage was pulling away, Saul saw it — a hand shifting the drapes, a glimpse of a face in the window. A shape in the shadowed interior. A woman, cradling an infant child.

She saw him just as he saw her. Just as he had strained to see her, she looked back to see him. 

“Who was that?” he asked when the carriage had moved on but Detrich hadn’t, still standing in a strangely empty patch in the middle of the busy market street.

Detrich at last looked away from the back of the departing carriage, seemed to shake himself out of the moment. “That,” he said, “was Duke Emen Stattenholme, Speaker of the Upper House of Parliament. The Kaiser’s backbone, insofar as he has one.” People around them were still dawdling for a chance to stare and listen. He shook his head. “We’re done for today, then. Home.”

The warning was subtle, but Saul sensed it well enough. He kept his silence until they had left the market and were walking down a side street, empty but for ten thousand birds in the trees that rose between the narrow houses. “That man, he’s the enemy you told me about?”

“You do not have my permission to kill him.”

Saul snorted. He bent down to scoop up a rock, threw it at a bird that flashed across their path. “What does he want with you?”

“He wants peace. Which is to say, he wants the country to stay exactly as it is, quiescent, while he and his fellow nobles creep their way back into all the power they lost in the revolution.”

“But what does he want with  _ you _ ?”

Detrich’s already slow pace slowed a touch further. “Oh, he has reason to hate me,” he said. There was a depth to his eyes, his voice, that Saul was learning to recognize. Memory lived there, tucked away most of the time, let out only on a tight rein. “A dozen reasons, as many as his kin who died in the revolution. Mother — his father lives, a wreck of a man — two brothers, a sister, a brother- and sister-in-law, and their children… his own wife, though they’d been childless six years at the time, so I can’t say how much he regrets that particular loss. The Stattenholmes were middling nobility, but they were loyal. Now the Duke holds the highest station in Hyem bar the Kaiser himself. Loyalty bought that, at the cost of his family. And he blames me for arranging the trade.”

“Did you kill them yourself?”

“Not with my own hands. I ordered the elder brother shot when my soldiers captured him. The rest died in battle or under siege, or at the hands of their own tenant farmers. It’s a bloody business, revolution.”

“But it isn’t civil war,” Saul said, and picked up another rock.

Detrich held out a hand, palm up. Reluctant, Saul dropped the rock into it, and was surprised when the Land’s Own turned and hurled it up at a tree. A great cloud of birds billowed up screaming, and an apple came dropping down, one of the massive sort Saul had never seen before Hyem.

“When I first came to the capitol,” Detrich said as Saul dove for the fruit, “a man who did this could be hanged. The trees of the city belonged to the Kaiser. If civil war were the cost of justice…”

But he trailed off then. Saul didn’t press the question. The apple was sweet, just on the side of overripe, and he thought of how in an Ilyigan city the trees would have been stripped bare already.

Instead he asked, “Who was the woman?”

“You saw her?” Detrich seemed genuinely surprised. “His second wife, Anké Iselholme. Her family called her back from Lansikaa for the match. Their daughter was born last spring, what was her name, Ameré, Amilia... Amika.”

They spoke little more on the way back to the house. Saul’s head felt overfull, heavy with colours and voices. His borrowed Hyemi clothes chafed. The song from the beer hall, the thundering chorus of soldiers and girls and old men, rang stubbornly in his mind: an insistent melody, though he still knew few to none of the words. It competed with the end-of-summer birdsong in his ears. The faltering voice of the girl who’d bandaged his hand ( _ were you in the civil war?)  _ and the murmurs in the market and  _ the cost of justice… _

He was relieved when they got back and Detrich announced that Saul was to carry on his usual routine. But instead of coming with him to the courtyard, he called Alamann into the office and shut the door behind the two of them, leaving Saul with orders to go out and run his drills on his own. “You know your tasks, and you know the rules” — and as simple as that, he left Saul alone, unsupervised, for the first time in two weeks.

It was early afternoon; the courtyard was flooded with sunlight. Nothing there, only the beaten track under the wall that he had run hundreds of times, the poplar trees dusted with rust and gold, the bench where Detrich always sat with his guns — but no guns. Even the bucket Mia had used against him on the first day was gone from under the water pump. Nothing that resembled a weapon. From outside the wall, the sounds of the city about its day drifted in. The sounds of Hyem.

Saul jumped onto the bench, stretched a hand up, and caught and broke off a poplar branch. Not thick enough to do anyone any harm, however well-swung, but the right length overall, the right shape. As soon as he held it, his body remembered, and all else was quiet.

An hour later, he came back into the house, drenched in sweat and satisfaction. He’d snapped the branch in half when he was done with it and thrown the halves out over the wall, but still he peeked uncertainly around the corner at the office door, only to find it still shut, with Mia standing outside. They exchanged wary looks across the stretch of corridor.

“He’s asleep,” she said. “and you’ll be very sorry if you disturb him.”

“What — you’ll hit me with your bucket again?”

Mia snorted. “Oh, you’ll find out what Fro Detrich is willing to do to get some sleep. And besides, I have the keys to the kitchen now.”

She moved from the door and marched right past him, chin in the air. As she opened the kitchen door, a wave of mingled aromas swept over him. He followed behind, his contentment gentling suspicion into curiosity.

Mia had a full meal laid out: fat sausages in gravy, rich and lemony sauerkraut, fresh bread and fresher cream. Inside the kitchen, the intensity of scent made Saul’s head spin. He sat down a little too late to hide as much from Mia’s smug look.

“He is the greatest man alive, but he can’t cook,” she said with a jerk of her head back toward the door, the corridor, and the office beyond it. “Now, if you behave yourself with  _ me _ , you’ll see it’s worth your while.”

“You make all this every day?”

“Of course. Or something like it. That is my job. You’ve never had sauerkraut before?” She looked baffled, seeing him prod at the dish with his fork. “This is a simple meal really, Fro Detrich isn’t particular. But I do like to make an effort for Alamann.”

Saul focused on chewing the pickled vegetables slowly. They thrummed with flavour on his tongue. He’d eaten pickles before, of course. But they were the food of peaceful houses, where women lived who planned for seasons and years, not for scrabbling days in which fresh vegetables were too precious to put away for a tomorrow that may not come.

As he was finishing off the last sausage, Mia slipped into the larder and came back out with a tray of honey-glazed pasties. She put them under his nose and said, “Now, tell me how it went in the market.”

Saul eyed the pasties with interested understanding. In the end, he decided, it wasn’t  _ his _ business whether Mia had or did not have Detrich’s leave to give them to him. “Everyone asked him questions, but all he said was that he wasn’t allowed to answer. No one was happy.”

“That’s no news at all. Did you go to the Two Cannons? The beer hall, where the soldiers drink?”

“Yes. It was all talk of war. They sang a song about it — the soldiers and all the rest.” He paused to lick honey off his fingertips. “Then we met a man in a carriage. Duke Stattenholme.”

Mia sucked in a breath. “You met the Duke! Oh, I’d give a month’s pay to have been there. What did they talk about?”

“Will you make more of those later?”

“You’re not even meant to have the ones I made already,” Mia complained, but glanced at the oven. “If Fro Detrich goes out again tomorrow. Now tell me, did they fight?”

“He’ll be going out tomorrow to testify in Parliament.” Her widening eyes told him that this at last was news she thought worth the bargain. “I don’t understand what any of it’s for. He wants to fight, the soldiers want to fight. What’s to stop them?”

She looked at him as though freshly unimpressed. “Hyem is a civilized country. Even the Land’s Own must follow the law and obey the government. Even —” she hesitated, but finished twice as resolutely for it “— even if he is the greatest man alive.”

But a moment later she added, hushed, “But there  _ will _ be war, if Fro Detrich wills it. Just as there was a revolution. I should tell Alamann what you told me…”

She looked away from the now-empty tray of pasties, to the door, the corridor beyond. They could both hear it: some unexpected visitor was making a prolonged, petulant complaint, while Alamann answered with perfect, even friendly civility. Measured and easy, even when his voice crackled on a cough and a wheeze, and the visitor protested that he would not be ordered about by some invalid kept on by the Land’s Own’s charity.

Mia grumbled under her breath. “How he keeps his peace with these creatures I’ll never know. Charity! If it were me, that fool would be waiting for his appointment for the next six months.”

“But he  _ is  _ an invalid.”

“And what of it?”

“He can’t be a soldier.”

“Why should he be?”

He shrugged at her confusion, unable to explain the self-evident; abruptly her voice took on a searing edge: “Alamann’s body is weak but his mind is sharp. He works hard. In another year’s time we’ll have enough money saved for the both of us to go to university. And after that we’ll be married. And you don’t know anything.”

He thought she’d throw him out after that, or try to. But she only went back to her cooking after giving him a hard, black look, and after a while his mind managed to persuade both body and soul that no more food was forthcoming. It was growing late, the yard already sinking into shadow, and the door to Detrich’s office was still shut and locked. Saul went up to his room.

He took the blood orange out from under his borrowed Hyemi shirt and sat on his bed to peel it, inch by savoured inch.

A spray of juice misted his hand when he broke through the peel, and the fresh, acid smell, almost like the smell of the sea in the evening, bludgeoned him worse than all the smells of Mia’s kitchen. He let his mind circle back into its earlier weight of thoughts that he’d left behind when he’d gone to the courtyard, just to pull himself clear of a rushing tide of memory. The song from the beer hall rose again as soon as he thought back on it.  _ Courage, glory, homeland… _

There was something vaguely familiar in the fire of it. He thought back to the sacerdotes who walked with the army, barefoot and bareheaded in all terrains and weathers, speaking fever-eyed of the icy teeth of hell that awaited the Westerner heretics who thought of Father Sun as a soft-hearted woman. Some of the other boys followed them like pups, like the little insects that burned in the lamplight. The holy men blessed them before battle. They poured olive oil over their heads and told them the slick coating could stop blades and bullets. Grown men, too. Running at the enemy with their chests bare, roaring. Reaped without ceremony, because steel was steel and oil was oil.

It was true, of course, that heresy bought hell. But he had long ago stopped listening, bored with words. If the Unconquered Sun had wanted victory, he’d reasoned, He would have willed it already. But all there ever was, was more war. Which was well: He was a soldier, a fighting man, and in war no one could match him. If the other boys looked to the sacerdotes for the Sun’s favour, they were looking the wrong way.

But now he was an exile. What did he owe the god of his homeland?  _ Maybe I should go to a Western temple.  _ Though the Western priests when he’d heard them had had nothing more interesting to say than the Eastern.  _ It’s all the same. War is war.  _ He ripped a slice of orange free, the fragile pith severed, thick liquid spurting between his fingers.

When a blade was in his hands, even when the poplar branch had been in his hands, none of this was important.

But Detrich — it was important to  _ him _ , because he worked it, like Saul worked his blade.  _ How do you think any war starts?  _ Mia had said that when  _ Detrich  _ willed a thing…

He raised the slice between the lamp and his eye, watched the light bleed through it. Tried to imagine the Hyemi at war, where soldiers were dirty and killed with whatever came to hand, and young girls were afraid of them, everyone was afraid of them. This was well: he’d hold a blade again soon enough. Be a soldier.

Detrich’s soldier.  _ To know all your commands have a worthy end _ , Hyem’s Land’s Own Guardian had said. And Saul had taken his bread, as though he had any idea what a worthy end was.  _ I was just hungry. _

He was still hungry, would always be, in exile. All he’d learned was not to die of it. But soldiers never lived long anyway. It had all been just borrowing time — the gentle meals on the train, the sweet preserves, Mia’s lovingly made meal. The apple from the tree in the street where Detrich had spoken of the cost of justice. Just bits and pieces keeping him going, until, until —

Until the war.  _ That must be the worthy end, then. _

It was full dark outside by now, and his head felt terribly heavy. He blew out the lamp and pulled himself tight into the corner where his bed sat. In the absence of any light, he finally bit into the blood orange. He’d hoped it would taste like gold, but it tasted like Ilyiga. 


	6. The Doorstep

The flavour of the orange lingered in Saul’s mouth all night, soaking into his dreams, and the next day he could think of nothing else. He dawdled daydreaming about it through all his morning chores, through his lacklustre breakfast, even as Detrich announced that he was off to Parliament and that Saul was to look after his own training again. Even the promise of more time alone in the courtyard with a fresh poplar branch wasn’t distraction enough. Instead Saul stood, looked at the gate, and thought about the fruit stall. The market. The smells and colours. Thought of all there was outside. Just outside.

He’d taken Detrich’s bread and his command with it. Discipline. Rules.  _ You want to be a soldier?  _ The flavour of the orange seemed to flare on his tongue, bright and angry. Detrich wouldn’t take an orange even when handed one freely.  _ What would he do, throw me out? _

He climbed the gate easily and sprang loose down the street of the foreign city.

It took him a while to work his way back to the market. The Hyemi capitol was bigger than Alsden, and arranged by a different logic — more Northern, he supposed. He wandered about for a while in distracted curiosity, drawn to the big houses, the gardens here in the wealthy area where the Land’s Own’s house was. Fascinated by the gaslights, which a passing woman proudly told him were the first to be installed in all Hyem. “In Adalas, they have them everywhere,” she added. “One day, when Hyem rules the Essine trade again…” and the rest was unspoken, but understood.

But for now there was no fighting. Only gates with iron wrought in the shapes of the flowers that the Hyemi loved, and door handles shaped like horseheads, and glinting Western sun-disks above the door. Here and there early chestnuts among the carpet of fallen leaves. It was colder today; idly he wondered if this far north he might someday see snow.

_ I wouldn’t have seen any of this in Ilyiga _ . When he said that to himself, it almost meant something.

Once he was at the market his focus sharpened again. He found the stall with little difficulty. But the arrangement was different today; he couldn’t see any oranges — and the vendor was watching her wares like a hawk. Saul lingered out of sight, thinking. The easiest thing to do would be to pick a pocket, as he’d done a hundred times in Alsden, but he didn’t know how much he might need…

The vendor was speaking to a man who looked like a close relative of hers, perhaps a brother. In the hubbub, Saul just caught her mentioning something to him about a storehouse, and the man nodded and turned to leave.

Luck was on his side today, it seemed. The man was tall and easy to pick out in the crowd. Saul followed him for a while down the main street, then into a smaller but still busy pathway. He fell a handful of paces behind, and then continued to follow round a corner and into an alley.

The man wasn’t a fool; Saul could tell he was aware of his stalker, saw the tension rise in him as soon as they were out of sight of the wider street. Another few steps and the man gave a sharp whistle, and around another corner a pair of dogs began to bark. That complicated things. The man, Saul could handle barehanded; not a dog, much less two. When the man turned into a cul-de-sac, Saul stopped short and pressed himself to a wall at the turn. He cautiously leaned forward to keep his eyes on the man as he came up to the door of one of the storehouses. The man knelt, looking around him all the while, and retrieved a large knife — almost a cleaver — from under a loose tile by the doorstep. Well, that solved Saul’s next problem.  _ You kill no one but by my explicit order…  _ he reasoned that dogs didn’t count.

And the man — it was up to him how hard he fought.

Saul turned the corner. The man straightened, glanced back, and seemed to waver at the sight of such a young, slight would-be robber. The dogs were wiser, scrabbling frantically at the door.

Saul rushed him.

The man yelled in alarm and threw up the hand holding the cleaver. He wasn’t a fighter. His stance was useless. Saul slammed into him and knocked him back against the door. He grabbed the man’s right wrist. Hooked a foot behind his knees. Dropped him. Wrested his arm, his hand, the cleaver to the side. Pressed an elbow into his throat —

Something gripped the back of his neck, a grip stronger than iron.

He was suddenly yanked backward, off his feet, flailing in the air — it had been years since Saul had panicked on the field, but the white-blind frenzy of it rushed right back in. He kicked and howled and scrabbled behind him. His hand met another hand. Someone was holding him,  _ holding him up _ , like a kitten, like a scrap of hanging cloth. An arm caught both of his, and then he was forced face-down into the dirt, legs twisted under him, a knee at the small of his back, stronger than anything he’d felt in his life, more than steel, more than  _ human — _

“Down!” hissed a young woman’s voice.

Saul’s breath came in desperate snatches, dust in his mouth and eyes. He saw the fruit vendor’s brother rise wavering to his feet, giving a grateful nod to whoever was holding him.  _ Who _ ?  _ How?! _

“Thank you, Frowe Baier,” the man exhaled.

The young woman spoke again, calmly, even cheerfully. “Only my duty, Fro.”

_ Is she even older than me?  _ Saul tried to twist. No use whatsoever. Frowe Baier wasn’t just strong: there was a weight to her, to her presence and her pressure, that made him completely unable to resist as she hauled him up to his feet and shoved him against the wall. From the corner of his eye he could just glimpse a plain face, short hair, a short wiry frame clad in —  _ oh _ .

“You’re a Guardian!” Something bright sparked under his furious humiliation. No wonder she’d overpowered him so easily; now it all made perfect sense. But now he knew, and if he could get free and fight her again…

“The Merchants’ Guardian. And you’re Fro Detrich’s Ilyigan lad,” Baier answered, light and sharp as she bound his hands together. “He won’t be very pleased with you, I suspect.”

“How do you know I’m not here on his — “

She tightened the bonds with a vicious pull. “Don’t try me, little exile.”

The flash of brightness vanished.  _ Get loose and kill her _ . Though what Detrich would do with him then, he couldn’t guess.  _ I broke his rules already _ . He didn’t think the Land’s Own would be forgiving of any of the morning’s escapade. Cut and run. It seemed obvious. He was better at checking his hunger. He could be free of the whole affair.

Baier pulled him away from the wall while he was debating with himself, shoved him back up the cul-de-sac and toward the main thoroughfares. His legs were free. He knew her strength now.

Detrich would never take him back.  _ But I could kill her. _ And go back and get the oranges. Run free in Hyem’s vast and marvelous capitol. And then, after — after — 

_ What?  _ His mind ran in paralyzed confusion like a ship onto a shoal. There would be only one certainty: he would never get to fight in Detrich’s war.

Baier paused before they turned back onto the market street. “I can’t march you like this all the way to the Land’s Own’s house,” she mused.

“He isn’t in today. He’s gone to Parliament.”

“I know that. Did you think no one would notice what you were up to?”

“I knew.” It was beyond that point that he never thought. He didn’t know when. How. But  _ What would he do, throw me out?  _ had become  _ If he throws me out, what would I do? _

Baier shoved him roughly in the back. “So you’re just a thankless pup who thinks he’s invincible. Well, you can wait just as well in a cell at the market guardhouse.” She navigated him ahead of her as they came among people again, passersby nodding at the Guardian with intrigued respect to see her leading her captive. No one offered her help, Saul noticed; it seemed that no one thought she needed it. Baier smiled at her countryfolk, all splendid, easy confidence. The way it made her move through the world was enthralling, the way the world moved  _ for _ her — but even she came to a hesitant halt, when she saw the carriage.

It was the same carriage as the previous day, Saul saw, traveling through the same stretch of market. But the window blinds were drawn back, and he could see her fully.

Anké Stattenhome.

He saw her notice him — her dark eyes widened slightly, delicate brows arching. She leaned forward and said something to her driver. The carriage stopped before him and Baier, blocking their view of the street. The Duchess opened the door but did not descend. He looked up at her: tall for a woman, full-figured, and very beautiful. Her dress was a summer-evening blue.

“Frowe Baier,” she said.

Baier inclined her head — not quite a bow. “Duchess Stattenholme.” Wary, but respectful. “How may I help you?”

But the Duchess’s voice was a soft one, and intrigued. “This young man — the Land’s Own’s Ilyigan boy?”

“Yes. I have him in hand.”

“Great Sun. What has he done?”

“Nothing of note. Boys misbehave.”

“And women endure it — a fact of life in every country,” the Duchess said, with a nod and a sigh. “Do you take him back to the Land’s Own’s house? It is quite a way, and — “ she paused, glancing left and right.

Something in the tenor of the street was changing — Saul noticed it as soon as he followed her gaze. A sudden agitation to the conversations, the crowd breaking up into small huddles. Somewhere deeper into the market, someone was shouting something he couldn’t make out. “That way may be difficult,” the Duchess finished.

Baier too was noticing the shift in mood all around them. Her grip on Saul’s bound wrists tightened a fraction. “We are going to the guardhouse.”

He tried to turn and look at her. “What’s happening?”

“Not your business.”

“Frowe Baier, if I may.” The Duchess took the first of the three steps leading from the carriage door to the street. “I have some desire to speak with the boy —”

Baier stiffened. “Whatever the Duke wants — “

“No, I myself. You know of my interest in foreign affairs — histories, great works and such,” she said lightly. The ferment around them was growing, and Baier shifted from foot to foot and back again. “I give you my word of honour that I will return him to Fro Detrich’s house just as surely as you would.”

“I take him to be punished, not to enjoy an afternoon salon.” She tugged on the bonds, chafing Saul’s wrists, but he kept his silence. Now that he’d given up on killing the Guardian, he liked the thought of riding in the carriage much better than being shoved about in the agitated market, never mind sitting in a cell, and he knew better than to hint as much to Baier. 

“The Land’s Own will see to that in his own time, surely? Frowe Baier…” The Duchess’s voice dropped a notch, and she took another step down. Now she sounded concerned, even a touch afraid. “Things are… complex, at Parliament. I daren’t try to tell you your duty, but —”

She looked left and right again, and Baier looked with her, and Saul could feel the ripple run through the both of them.  _ What are they seeing?  _ What he saw was a thrust of movement beginning up the street and to the north. Some wary shopkeepers were closing up their stalls, and more than one set of eyes in the crowd was turned sharply, balefully toward the carriage…

A man in a rumpled Guardian’s uniform broke from the throng, breathless. He grabbed at Baier’s arm, talking too quickly, with too much energy to notice the private circle of tension he’d stepped into. “Alsie! Have you had a summon? What are you doing, we need to go, it’s about to turn —” His voice staggered to a halt as he finally saw the Duchess. “Ah — Meine Frowe Stattenholme, you shouldn’t be here —”

Baier dropped one hand from Saul’s restraints to prod her fellow Guardian’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?”

“You haven’t heard? Fro Detrich was due to testify just now. He demanded open doors. Duke Stattenholme said absolutely not. The Prime Minister was furious and petitioned the Kaiser — the Kaiser walked out — the Duke spoke to the Minister of the Army, but he wouldn’t speak against Fro Detrich — it’s up for debate now, both Houses were called. The whole city is going to Parliament!”

Baier’s eyes grew wide. She looked from Saul, to the Duchess, whose lovely features were pinched ever so slightly with growing concern. Saul hesitated himself. He still wanted to ride in the carriage, but this business at Parliament held a promise of action.  _ And what would Detrich do, then? _

The other Guardian gave Baier’s arm another urgent tug. “Whatever you have here, it’s not as important. Come on!”

Baier looked at the Duchess imploringly. “I — I dare not leave him with you, Meine Frowe, it isn’t safe — “

To Saul’s intrigued surprise, the driver turned in his seat and growled to them in a heavy accent, “Don’t fret, Guardian. If he gives mij damme as much as a hard look…” and he shifted the wing of his jacket to show a pistol, a wonderful little weapon, unlike any of its type that Saul had ever seen.

That decided him — he wanted to know more about Anké Stattenholme, her carriage, and her man — and it decided Baier. She directed Saul up into the carriage, shoving hard against his token resistance, and with a few more words of warning she vanished with her fellow Guardian into the agitation of the market crowd.

Saul settled onto the seat opposite the Duchess, on plush black velvet studded with polished silver buttons. The seats were hung with canopy-like drapes, the ceiling painted with silver horseheads. The noise of the market vanished with the closing of the door. He had the feeling of having stepped into another world.

“I should have asked her to untie your hands,” the Duchess said apologetically.

Baier had left his arms pulled back to an almost vindictively tight degree. Too hard to shrug comfortably, but Saul gave the Duchess half the gesture anyway. He was working on the bonds already.

Then the Duchess leaned forward, a strange gleam to her eyes in the murk of the carriage, and he realized that she was young. A little older than Mia, perhaps; not that much older than him. There was something almost like hunger in her voice, and almost like a sigh, as she looked at and into him and quietly said, “You really are from Ilyiga.”

Her echoing longing stilled his hands. He spoke instinctively in his native tongue: “Have you been there?”

She answered in kind, stumbling over tense and form: “In young — more young — she hope, someday. After war.”

“‘When I was young. I hope’,” he corrected without thinking, though he did think better of correcting her about  _ after the war _ . 

The Duchess flushed slightly. 

“Tell me of it,” she said in Hyemi.

“About the war?”

“About Ilyiga.”

Hearing her hard language again irked him; he went back to working at the ropes. “Tell me where you’re really taking me.”

Duchess Stattenholme’s lips pursed and her eyebrows rose. She sat back against the velvet, the distance falling between them like a clear screen. “You are a sharp lad,” she said. “You’ll see.”

The way was not long, after. The driver’s whip whistled and snapped as it cleared the way for them; they turned away from the market and down a wide avenue, then past a gate into a walled-off quarter of the city. Saul could hear an increasing commotion in the distance, now even through the door, and thought Parliament must not be far; but this green and beautiful enclave was serene in its emptiness. The houses here were larger than any others he’d seen in the city — and many of them, he noted, showed signs of recent repair to venerable old stonework.

_ The revolution _ , he thought, and it occurred to him that the emptiness could be less serene and more huddled in fear.

Another gate; a large courtyard. The carriage stopped just as he finally managed to work his hands free. The driver appeared at the door to offer the Duchess a hand down, then to hover about Saul, glaring at him, his hand on his pretty pistol. The Duchess thanked her man in a language Saul did not recognize. He led them both to a side entrance to the great house. They passed through a guardroom, where a solitary guard in black and silver stood at attention, then through another door into a small, exquisitely furnished office, dominated by the same two colours. 

And in the office, Duke Emen Stattenholme.

Saul could not say he was entirely surprised, but he still tensed all over when he saw the man, when the Duke looked up from the papers on his desk and their eyes met. Nothing bland about him here: that gray gaze was as keen and cold as an ice-pick. The Duke rose to his feet, came around the desk as the driver saluted and the Duchess offered a low curtsy, head bowed.

“My husband,” she said softly. “I am relieved to see you here.”

The Duke’s eyes stayed on Saul. But he halted by his wife’s side to lay a hand on the small of her back. “I was never less than safe, Anké. Don’t fret. If anything, it is you who should not have been out there now.”

She smiled faintly. “My good Heer Vestgaard would never have seen me harmed. And… there was need.”

“I see as much. Remarkable, I must say, that it played out as you had hoped. You are a credit to your sex, my darling.” His touch became a brief caress, before he moved away. “Go on, now. I haven’t much time before the hearing, and sweet Amika has been fussy with her mother away.”

The Duchess moved obediently to the door, Vestgaard trailing her like a menacing shadow. She glanced at Saul only once more, back over her shoulder. Looking at and into him with the same dark eyes that had drawn him that previous day in the market. Then she was gone.

“My guard outside is swifter than you think,” the Duke said, standing before his desk, only a yard of distance between himself and Saul. “But no — I do not believe you a fool, my boy.”

Saul was still tense all over, though he was not wholly sure why. He did not fear the Duke’s guard, and he did not think the Duke would try to harm him. He thought the man’s intent clear: _He thinks I know something about Detrich’s plans_. That was going to be a sore disappointment for Emen Stattenholme. _But_ _would he let me go, after?_ Detrich had explicitly mentioned a lack of permission to kill the man, and Saul had no interest in being hunted by all Hyem for killing their chief noble. _Why am I part of this game now?_

He shrugged. That was rarely less than safe. “You’re Detrich’s enemy, not mine.”

To his surprise, the Duke gave a faint huff of doubtful air out his nose. “I appreciate the sentiment,” he said, then leaned back around to ring a small brass bell on the desk. Moments later, the door opened and a woman came in with a covered tray. She bowed once to the Duke, put the tray on the desk and revealed a large bowl of meat stew with egg noodles, with bread and butter alongside, then bowed again and left.

The food was fresh and steaming. Saul’s stomach instantly twisted itself in a double knot.

“Go on,” the Duke said.

“I’m not a dog you can tame with a bone.”

“My good lad, if it’s loyal blades I need, I have a nation’s army. If it’s Detrich’s secrets, I have keener eyes and ears than yours. I hear that you were a general in Ilyiga. I hardly believe a man such as yourself can be so easily bought.”

“Then what’s this?”

The Duke returned his own shrug back to him. “You are, it is clear, quite dangerous,” he said simply. “I wish to know if you are a danger to my countrymen. If you are a savage, or may be reasoned with. To sit down for a peaceful meal, for example.”

He turned around — giving Saul his back without hesitation — and circled the desk back again to settle into his chair, sat with his fingered twined together before him. He nodded at another, equally cushioned chair off to the side, and watched with polite interest as Saul slowly pulled it over and sat down.  _ Should I tell him I need someone to check me when I eat?  _ The idea of anyone but Detrich doing as much made him bristle.

He picked up the bread and tore a rough chunk. The Duke clicked his tongue.

“I suppose I need not be surprised that Detrich isn’t teaching you any manners.”

“He’s a soldier.” Saul soaked the piece of bread in the stew, bit into it, and spoke while chewing. “And I’m a soldier.”

“He is something of the sort, yes. Although a commander is not quite any soldier.”

“Wasn’t he a general?”

“Oh — no, no. His highest rank was rittmeister — that is, a cavalry officer, commanding perhaps a hundred men. How many have you commanded?”

“Forty, sometimes.” The unit rarely stayed of one size for long. Boys came, boys died.

“Forty.” The Duke sounded reluctantly impressed. “At your age. When he was sixteen, Detrich was herding pigs.”

“Were  _ you  _ in the army?” He didn’t think so. The Duke’s hands were smooth, pale, very fine.

The Duke smiled sadly. “I had that desire, as a younger man,” he said wistfully. “But the revolution did away with personal desires. Only I was left of my family, and the last scion of a noble line in Hyem has duties he cannot abandon.”

The last scion — the revolution had cost the Duke his family, Detrich had said, but gave him his status in trade. He studied the man opposite him closely.  _ Detrich could just kill him if it weren’t for the law.  _ “He told me that they were loyal to the Kaiser, your family.”

“None more loyal.”

“What for, if it got them all killed?”

Now the Duke sighed. “Of course, it would be difficult for you to understand.”

Saul bit off another large chunk of bread, made a token attempt to chew it more slowly. The Duke sat in silence, his gaze drifting away to the room’s solitary, curtained window. Outside, boots sounded on stone, men exchanging brief words. A changing of the guard in the courtyard. One man told another to listen for the quarter gate’s alarm bell. Then silence again; a thick silence.

The Duke turned his eyes back to catch Saul midway through a swallow of stew and noodles, the focus suddenly so hard that Saul almost choked.

“What does he want with you?” the Duke said, his voice low. “He has enough loyal men. His personal tastes run to older flesh. What kind of weapon is he making?”

Saul forced his throat to work. “I don’t know,” he said, realizing as much with the words.

“Is it simple charity? Detrich sees himself as some great champion of the wretched…”

“I’m not wretched.”

“Perhaps he does not agree.”

_ He wants me to be his soldier.  _ “What do  _ you  _ want with me?”

“I want you not to be my enemy,” the Duke said plainly. “Detrich may not fear you, but I do.”

Saul swallowed again. Those words,  _ fear you _ , slipped between his ribs and briefly made his lungs feel buoyant with secret thrill. “I already said —”

“I heard. But I do not think you understand, young general, just who your patron is.”

He paused a moment, studying the response in Saul’s face, nodding at him to keep eating as he spoke. “Detrich wishes you to take him for a commander worthy of you. He does this, you may have noticed, by implying that you are not worthy of  _ him _ . He calls you a lad and himself a general — at half his age, your achievements already threaten to equal his. You commanded forty? In ten years you might command four thousand. He started his revolution when, after ten years of service, he would not be promoted higher than the command of one hundred. I do not lie. Ask him if you wish. Ask him — why, ask him about Willie Arnbau.”

Something in the Duke’s impeccability thinned as he spoke, showed the faintest wear. Something else showed through, straining against that film. Saul watched it with attention, with growing fascination. “Who is that?”

“He was Detrich’s loyal man,” the Duke said in a drawn-out exhale. “An officer turned revolutionary, just like him. One of that core group, in fact, who began it all. One day his troop took a town, and as was their practice they hanged the ruling landsgraf and his wife in the square. But the landsgraf had an elderly mother, and a son not three months old, and Arnbau took pity. Even tempered steel balks at spearing a suckling babe… he spared them, sheltered them in secret, made arrangements to smuggle them out of the country. But Detrich caught the three of them on the road. And do you know what he did?”

“Did he kill the child?”

“‘I can tolerate mercy,’ he said, famously, ‘but I cannot tolerate treason.’ And he let the woman and infant go, and hanged Willie Arnbau in their place.”

Saul felt his eyes widen. He glanced down to realize he had stopped with the spoon halfway up from the bowl to his mouth. The Duke gave a single, vicious nod. “That is Festus Detrich, encapsulated. A show of magnanimity for the masses, yet this is how his own soldier was repaid. So now tell me, young Saul — ” the Duke leaned forward, almost too close “— is he so different from Gabrello Attoré, who made you his officer, then made you an exile?”

The door opened with a sharp sound. Saul swept a letter opener from the desk, twisted round to leap from his seat, and was at the guard’s throat before the man could as much as lay a hand on his sword.

The guard froze. The Duke did not move from his own seat. Standing, panting, strained, his fist throbbing around its grasp on the little blade, Saul could not see what he did, and barely recognized that he spoke. Slowly the guard raised both hands, palms flat out. He stayed that way until Saul’s heart began to slow, until he could lower the letter opener, and take a step back, and remember that Attoré was in Ilyiga, and a thousand miles away.

The letter opener was a pitiful little thing, without polish or balance, with little strength. But if he used the momentum from turning back around, he could still throw it clean into the Duke’s eye. He thought about it for a long moment.

“Your Grace,” the guard said uneasily. “An envoy is here from Parliament. You are —”

“Needed; of course.” The Duke’s smooth voice broke through the moment, through the illusion that his death could be a clean end to anything. This was a man even Detrich considered an obstacle. There had to be good reason.  _ Maybe it’s how well Stattenholme knows him _ . “Prepare my coach. This young man may stay here as our guest for as long as he wishes. See that he is looked after accordingly, and escorted back to the Land’s Own’s house whenever he wishes.”

The guard looked down at Saul with open dismay. But all he said was, “Your Grace.”

The Duke ignored him; Saul finally turned around to see him rise unhurriedly, gathering some papers from his desk. “That will be all — although of course, sergeant, I expect that you should report to your commander that you permitted a man to hold steel to your throat within my own house, in my own presence. I expected a surer response. Swifter. Inform Major Breiholme that I expect to see you disciplined.”

The guard responded with a stilted salute. The Duke went past Saul to the door and, before leaving, gave him a nod. “My apologies, young general. But this will allow you some time to think about what I said. Detrich has use for you while he hopes for war, but afterward?”

Both men left without another word. Alone in the office, Saul sat heavily back down onto the chair.

He sat there for a long minute, until the door opened again and the same servant woman as before came in with another tray. This one held more bread alongside a collection of tidbits, wedges of strange cheeses, delicately sliced fruit, smoked meat and fish, a considerable amount overall. She left it on the desk and exited, and he fell to without much thought. His thoughts turned elsewhere, circled on themselves.

He didn’t think the Duke had lied: not about letting him leave when he pleased, but also not about anything he’d told him of Detrich. Lies would have been too easy.  _ And if it’s true, so what?  _ Maybe Detrich did want to use him, but so would the Duke — if the Duke had use for a soldier.

_ So did Attor _ é _.  _ That burned. That made his hands curl into fists, one around the handle of the letter opener he had not put down. It had been Samar steel in that hand once, the chain-whip, the weapon of his ancestors’ fabled city. His birthright, and Attoré had taken it. Had said boys shouldn’t hold such weapons anymore, because the time had come for peace. Had said,  _ And what could you be in peacetime, little general? _

But Detrich wanted war. Had promised him war. And after — after — it was beyond that point that he hadn’t thought. What came after Detrich’s war?  _ I don’t know _ , he thought, realizing as much with the words.

Did Detrich know?

He couldn’t unravel that question. His mind kept bringing up the image of Attoré. The chain-whip in the warlord’s fist, his boot smashing a spark of blue-green — the bracelet of Tezzei glass beads, all that Saul had had of his hometown. His ribs began to hurt, his stomach to roil with nausea. Suppose Detrich did turn on him — what did he have left to take or break?

He swallowed hard, coughed once tightly, and realized: he’d forced down everything on the tray. He tried to rise from the chair, only to sway to the side and heave it all back up again. 

By the time he was done Saul was clammy and shaking. His burned throat was tight. The hot pressure behind his eyes, a feeling he had almost forgotten, returned with violence. He rubbed a fist into one eye-socket, driving the pain like a spike up into his brain. _But_ _I was better. I was better!_ Nothing left of that but the thickening stench of sick in the closed room, and the memory of Detrich saying, irrevocably: _Alone, exiles die._

The door opened, first a crack, then swung wide to reveal the servant. He had expected that, but he had not expected to see the Duchess behind her.

The servant gave the scene one look of dull revulsion and turned back, no doubt to go fetch her cleaning implements. But Anké Stattenholme lingered. Her expression was unreadable, but she came up to the desk to take a handkerchief from a drawer and hand it to him.

“Clean your face,” she said quietly.

It wasn’t pity; it wasn’t whatever the girl in the tavern had tried to offer him along with the bandage for his hand. He didn’t know what it was. He took the cloth, wiped his mouth, blew his nose, didn’t know what to do to make his eyes stop feeling hot.

The Duchess said, “I have heard of soul-hunger.”

“I was better.” He had nothing else to say. He snapped, “What do you know about it?”

She blinked, then lowered her eyes, though it was not in submission. “I have met the exiles who came to Lansikaa after the revolution. Often they would say that their kin who were shot and hanged had been the lucky ones.” Her gaze rose again, and strayed from him, to the curtained window. “It is difficult to imagine, being apart in such a way that your soul cannot — cannot parse the  _ wrongness  _ of everything all about you, seeing it in — in every face, in the colour of the sunlight…”

She trailed off. Saul stared at her, the cramps in his stomach twisting worse. “You  _ can’t  _ imagine,” he said, hoarse. “You’re Hyemi.”

“Yes.” Her nod was strange. Too quick. “Yes, of course… I am Hyemi.”

She left the room a moment later when the servant returned. Saul sat on his chair with his head dropped against his chest, his mind as empty as his stomach.  _ I don’t know anything _ , he thought at last, more exhausted than bitter, and rose up to demand his promised escort back to the Land’s Own’s house.

It ended up being a shorter journey than he had expected, even walking slowly, alongside a guard who never said a word. Too soon they arrived back, and Alamann met them at the door, thanked the guard politely, and told Saul only, “He will be a while. Come help me in the yard.” The task waiting there, raking fallen leaves, was wearying while Saul still felt nauseous, and little by way of distraction. He tried to make the time pass faster by trying to get a rise out of the ever-serene Alamann, but the pale secretary only looked at him straight on and said, “If I try to fight, my heart will kill me before you have a chance to,” and even Saul had to admit that rather took the point out of it.

The sky was starting to change colour, into a deep blue like the Duchess Stattenholme’s dress, when a carriage approached the gate. Saul leaned on the rake and peered through the wrought-iron bars. Out stepped Detrich and Major Basholme, deep in animated discussion.

“ — amazed that they would disperse so easily, without a word from you. But they’ll be back tomorrow.”

“They need not. By tomorrow, Stattenholme will concede.” Detrich’s cane clacked against the cobblestones outside. He sounded marginally satisfied. “He understands how it stands now. He’ll give them what he can to ease the pressure.”

“And lose face in the Upper House?“

“That’s his account to balance. He can do it; there’s a great deal of credit in being seen to protect old Freider against me.”

“And so keep the flames low, and wait until spring.”

“Until this city is a powder keg.” The Land’s Own pushed the gate open. “The longer the investigation is seen to be stalling, the easier it would be, once the snows end, to — ”

He stopped, looking directly at Saul.

Fist closing about the handle of the rake, Saul drew himself up straight, but Detrich only kept walking. At his shoulder. Basholme looked torn between vicious amusement and viciousness plain and simple. But Detrich’s expression was cool, incisive but untroubled. As he passed Saul, making him turn around to keep following him with his gaze, he dryly asked, “How was your lunch with Duke Stattenholme?”

“I threw up.”

“That’s what you get.” Detrich stopped short of the door, nodding at Alamann as the secretary went past him and inside. “Come on, Gus. Let’s not waste Frowe Weber’s dinner.”

Basholme too stepped past Saul and inside without a word. Despite himself, furious with himself, Saul faltered. _Why isn’t he angry?_ He took a step forward. “I didn’t go to him — “

“Alsie Baier told me as much. Carried away in the lady’s coach, like a folktale prince.” Detrich finally turned, eyebrows raised at Saul’s bristling. “It’s a busy day you’ve had.”

“I only went as far as —”

“You’re sixteen. Running off like a fool now and then is in the blood.”

“I’m not a — I didn’t —”

“Kill that man? Luckily enough. Still, not surprising. You hardly know any better.”

_ At worst you’re just a brute.  _ The words echoed maddeningly in Saul’s mind.  _ He does want me to feel unworthy of him.  _ “Stattenholme told me that when  _ you  _ were sixteen you were a pigherd.”

“And?”

He still didn’t sound angry. Saul’s thoughts stumbled to an undignified halt. “And…?”

“Where’s the shame in that? I worked to feed myself and my family. You think it’s easy, herding pigs? I’d bet you couldn’t do it.” Detrich nudged the door shut. He stood with his back to it, between Saul and the house. “What else did he tell you — that I mutinied? Couldn’t get promoted, so broke my oaths of service? It’s the truth. The army that took ten years from me and then spat on me for my birth didn’t deserve my oath. That my father was a drunkard? That I lie with men? I own up to all of it. I am what I am. He wants me to be ashamed? I refuse." 

He breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring, eyes bright, while Saul stared up at him; his look back was steady. Secure. What brightened him now was something else altogether, something that slipped between Saul’s ribs and filled his chest in that same fathomless fashion as the sight of Baier, the Guardian, moving through the world like a great ship through a storm. 

He thought of what he’d seen of Detrich nights ago: slumped hopelessly weary in his chair, a mighty power choked with rage, hemmed in, lost. And he thought of all of that burned away before that brightness. Clouds before the sun. 

_ I want to learn _ . Something shifted in him with the thought, in the tone and the weight of his hunger. Suddenly hoarse, he said, “I came back.”

Detrich nodded once. “I knew you would.”

He turned back around to the door as Saul took in these words, both shocked and immediately believing them. But when Saul made to fall into step behind him, to go inside, Detrich stopped and raised a hand to block his way.

“This is my house, and my house has rules,” he said flatly. “A day in which you break those rules is a day in which you don’t set foot in my house.”

And he shut the door in Saul’s astonished face, an inch from his nose.

It was a little while before Saul sank down to the stone of the doorstep, baffled, exhausted, curled around his ruthlessly empty belly. Darkness was coming swiftly; inside the house there was light, and he could hear dishes clinking and smell Mia’s sauerkraut. He still struggled to parse Detrich’s lack of anger, and found himself searching in vain for his own.  _ He threw me out _ , he told himself, looking at the gate.  _ This is what comes after. He knew I’d come back. And he threw me out. _

But the gate before him was as shut as the door behind him, and the courtyard lay between the two. A silent stretch of distance yet left to cover, suspended between Detrich’s good graces and an exile’s death. As a thin rain began to fall, the great poplar trees offered shelter. 

_ No… no, he didn’t _ .

The doorstep was hard and cold, but no harder than the broken floor of a gutted house, no colder than an old battlefield. Saul leaned back against the door and slept, for once unbothered by the light. 


	7. Soldiers' Tales

Sometime in the night, the rain turned chill, the air piercing in a way Saul had never felt in Ilyiga, nor even in the south of Hyem. His exhaled breath began to coalesce into feathery puffs. When Mia opened the door early in the morning she found him in a shivering, sniffling huddle, full of choice words about her land and its idea of seasons. She gave him a mug full of steaming soup and sent him to bed with the warning that if he caught cold it would be entirely his fault. 

As it was, he woke none the worse for wear; but he found the office door locked, and Mia informed him that Detrich had gone to Parliament again and would not return before sunset. “Don’t you have anything useful to be doing?” she demanded when he slouched against the wall by the door, and after a hazy moment, it occurred to him that he did.

He went back outside. Briefly he thought of snapping off another poplar branch. Instead, Saul found himself running, running the track by the wall, as though Detrich were there on his bench with his papers and guns, watching.

The day was cool and overcast, threatening fresh rain. Crisp air burned his lungs and fed his muscles. Something felt cooler, too, in his brain, his gut. Some restless strain had drained out of him in the night, as though his heart had stopped hurling itself against the cage bars of his bones. A curious quiescence rested there instead, new, fragile, hesitant; but open, just as the door to the house had opened to him in the morning. It was a much less familiar feeling than that tangle of frustration he’d carried in his stomach all the way from the border. He could not name it.

He wondered if Detrich could. If Detrich had known it would be so, when he didn’t throw Saul out.

He didn’t know how to ask the question, and didn’t get to either way. When Detrich returned, he was as businesslike as though the previous day had never happened. He called Saul into his office and ordered a report on the day’s activities, then sat him down yet again with a thick book in Hyemi — the same book Saul had tossed out the window, the day he had backed down from slitting Detrich’s throat. And down Saul sat. Dinner followed, as he already knew it would, and the routine round of evening chores. The next morning, Detrich settled onto the very bench, with the very same papers and guns, and everything was the same; but with his mind gone quiet, nothing was.

The next day, after breakfast and instead of the drills, Detrich called him into the office again.

“I meant to give you this the other day.” He was browsing the top shelf of a cabinet full of books, one of several such cabinets in the room. Saul sat on the edge of the desk and peered at the shelf curiously. On it, the books were all in languages other than Hyemi. Most of them he didn’t recognize, but a handful, in the far corner —

Detrich pulled out a volume, put it down on the desk. Ilyigan letters, engraved and gilded, glinted at Saul’s eye.

 _Songs of Sunrise._ His breath caught.

“Where did you get this?” In his mind, the first hymn was already ringing. The clear voices of the dawn choir, rising heavenward to fill the temple dome.

“Gus gave it to me. He bought it in Alsden, before the civil war.” One corner of Detrich’s lips pulled up with the same wryness as it had in the beer hall, when the soldiers there greeted him by rank. “He said he was saying so many prayers for me, I may as well take the lot.”

“He’s an Easterner?”

“Many are, in his home province. The Southeast of Hyem is split almost equally between the Covenants.”

“And they don’t fight?”

“Not in this country.” To Saul’s unbelieving look, he added, “When the Hyemi were a coalition of tribes, back on the steppes, each one would have its own gods that the others respected. We have never been a people of one faith.” He went around the table, stood at Saul’s shoulder to watch him open the book with still-shocked care. “There are Eastern temples in the capitol. Summersclose is next week; if you wish, Gus will take you to service.”

 _Next week!_ He’d lost track of much more time than he’d realised. It had not yet been Summersdawn when he’d crossed into the borderland. “Would there be other Ilyigans there?”

“Not where Gus attends. But I can — “

“I’ll go with him.” Detrich nodded without question at that, but still, Saul found himself looking from the book to the Land’s Own’s face. Saying, “I don’t want to look at them.”

“Consider it set, lad.” There was a brief strangeness to Detrich’s voice, a hoarseness creeping in. But it was gone when he spoke again, gesturing at the book. “Keep it. The hymns are in Old Northern Script — can you read it?”

“I can read all of them. And write them, too.”

“All five?” That clearly caught him by surprise. “You write in the Samari style?”

“I learned when I was little. When I lived with my grandfather at the temple.” At Detrich’s once again strange tone, he added, on impulse, “It’s a small thing.”

Detrich’s brows shot up. There was a flicker in his dark eyes that wasn’t doubt. He lingered a moment on that surprise, then retrieved a handful of paper sheets and a pen — one made of carved horn, much finer than those that littered the desk, though not as fine as the gilded one Saul’s grandfather had used in his calligraphy. He then nodded Saul to his own desk chair.

“Show me.”

It wasn’t a challenge. That flicker in his gaze was clean excitement.

The strange open feeling gave a faint pulse inside Saul’s chest. He settled in the chair, finding the desk a touch too high, the pen not quite fitting into his fingers as his childhood quills had. The book lay open at the first hymn. They had sung it every morning at temple, and most mornings in the army, the pledge to emerge from ignorance into virtue with the re-emerging light. He still whispered it to himself every day on waking up, before opening his eyes.

He had not written it down in six years, almost half his life. But with the first pen-stroke, he found the skill was as suffused into his body as his skill with gun and whip and sword.

It swept him up. Or down, perhaps, into the moment when ink was absorbed into paper. He didn’t think about anything. The letters happened one after the other. All he was aware of was his own hand, and Detrich’s eyes on him.

“This is marvellous,” Detrich said in a low voice just as Saul was finishing the last line. He sounded riveted. Almost disturbed. “Who taught you?”

“My grandfather.” In his mind, the litany that went with the teaching. _Bright boy, summer-sent boy, born in the brightest month_ _—_ _the Unconquered Sun took your poor mother so I may keep you_ _—_ _learn His ways, and after the war_ _—_

“He was a sacerdote?”

“Grand Sacerdote of Tezzei.”

"It’s a great gift you have of him. This skill has a long heritage, and a proud one. In Samar — the city that's your family's namesake —"

“I know. He wanted me to take his place when I was older.” The militia had taken the temple’s treasures first, gilded pen and all. People still prayed, but Saul thought that if _he’d_ been the god, he would not have listened. “They ordered me to kill him before we left Tezzei." It had made a kind of sense, at the time.

Detrich was silent for a beat, before: “And did you?”

“What for? They wanted to see what they could make me do. I already knew what I could do.” He knew that it had been a test, and knew that he didn’t care to be tested, and that was that. Though from five years’ distance the memory was strange; stranger yet, when he realized that he was not being tested now. Only listened to.

He found himself frowning down onto the page. “He was just an old man. It would’ve been like butchering a chicken.”

“Not work for a soldier.”

“Not for _me_ .” They’d called him _little general_ already by then. For all that that ended up meaning.

He watched Detrich lean in to pick up the sheet. Eerily gentle on the thin paper, that hand that Saul knew could force his own down with so little effort. He raised it to the light, studied the fading gleam of drying ink. His voice still low, he said, “And you were eleven years old.”

“It was war. They all knew that I was born to be a warrior.”

“No one is born to be anything.”

Saul opened his mouth to protest, but a flash of thought stopped him. An echo of all that Duke Stattenholme had said. _He wasn’t born to be Land’s Own Guardian._

Into his silence, Detrich said, “There aren’t twenty men in Hyem who can scribe in this style. You could be the toast of the Kaiser’s court.”

Saul thought about it for a moment; then shrugged.

A shadow of strangeness passed over Detrich’s face again, though different now. One of his turned-inwards moments, closing him briefly, like one of his many books in languages that were foreign to Saul. Caught uneasily between that and the eerie, familiar feeling of a pen in his hand, Saul shifted in the chair, looked for something to say. He wound up gesturing at the paper still in Detrich’s hand. “Do you want it? I have no use for it.”

The Land’s Own hesitated, a fraction of a second. For that fraction, there on his face was a naked struggle — the same, Saul thought, as when he’d lingered on the oranges in the market.

Then Detrich shook his head. “I’ve no use for it either,” he deemed with finality, and lay the sheet back down. His hand lingered a moment on the wood of the table. “But it would be a shame to lose the skill. You should keep practicing.”

“Can I do it instead of learning to spell Hyemi?”

Detrich suddenly half-smiled again, sharp and wry. “Brat,” he said, in a tone Saul couldn’t parse, until he realized it must be fondness.

As he was absorbing that, Detrich collected his own papers — always an endless pile, as though they bred among themselves on his desk — and settled into the armchair in the corner with the lot in hand. He spoke on as he did: “Keep the book, it’s yours. Though I’ll not see you mistreat it. If I find it in the mud under your window — “

Saul choked audibly at the thought. “It’s a _hymnal,_ ” he said, before he remembered: they had burned books without looking at them, when books were all they had to feed a fire.

From Detrich’s face, he could tell that he followed the same thought, and more ruefully still. “It’s yours,” the Land’s Own said again. “But books aren’t cheap.”

He left it at that, as though that meant everything. As though his office weren’t packed with more books than Saul had ever seen in his life, never mind in one place, and his bedroom the same. Saul closed the book, ran his fingers over the leather of the cover, the letters in their shimmering gold. He thought, despite himself, of the steel of his chain-whip. Lost, now, in Ilyiga, in Gabrello Attoré’s hand.

An echo of the twist from days ago went through his gut. He looked back up, over his shoulder. Detrich was thumbing through the papers, muttering, as usual, about laws and taxes and nothing that Saul ever understood.

“Are you going to Parliament today?” There was still the war. The war was why he was here.

“Tomorrow.” Detrich spoke without looking up, absently as he scribbled down a note. “We want the same thing now, Stattenholme and I, to stretch the inquiry out over winter. But he wants the public bored with it, and I want them frustrated. It’s delicate going, and the ground is all his…” For a moment he breathed in, and it seemed he would continue, give words to some of that anger that shadowed him always — almost always. But as he raised his gaze to Saul, looked at him sitting at the desk, pen in hand, he let the breath out slowly instead. Then he perked up, putting the papers aside. “I almost forgot — “

He stood and came over to the desk again and opened a drawer. Under Saul’s unbelieving eyes, he brought out a blood orange.

“Here,” he said and placed it down next to the book. “Don’t let it stain the pages. And next time you want something badly enough to kill for it, lad, try asking first.”

* * *

The days grew steadily colder after that, summer in an ordered but certain retreat. Nothing of Saul’s training routine in the yard was changed by the chill and rain, but the house flew into a flurry of activity preparing for a winter that, he swiftly gathered, was much crueler than its Ilyigan cousin. Roof tiles were to be mended, pipes and drains inspected, firewood stocked. All of this cost money, and every cost soured Detrich’s mood for hours on end. The house’s heating budget in particular put the Land’s Own and his housekeeper at bristling odds. “When I was a student we’d just wear our coats,” Detrich had groused, to which Mia acidly asked if he’d coughed all winter then, too. At last Alamann had to step in and ask that Detrich consider his health if he would not consider his own; to which Detrich relented, only to turn around and vent his ire at Saul’s increasingly obvious need for winter clothes. “And you’re outgrowing your summer clothes, too,” he’d growled. “Do you know how much tailors cost?”

But to a tailor they went, a small shop in the poorer end of the market whose owner glowed like a spring sunrise to see the Land’s Own Guardian at his door. A shoemaker, too, and glovemaker, and before the week was out, Saul had for the first time in his life an outfit made especially for him. It was in the Hyemi style, too tight, too stiff, hideously bland in colour. But it was warm, and had never been anyone’s but his.

Meanwhile Detrich took him all over the city, on business that had nothing to do with war and little even to do with politics. They spent three interminable days doing nothing but talking to what seemed like every soul in the capitol. First in the market, going from store to stall, the Land’s Own speaking to every tradesman and merchant about their wares, their finances, what would and would not be bought and sold in the city in wintertime. Then to the artisans’ quarter, the university, the fine streets that housed lawyers and banks, the reeking maze of alleys where butchers and tanners plied their trade. The end of the third day found them in the slums, where Detrich spent the evening sat on the filth of the pavement, eyes shut. His bare palms lay flat to slick stone. Someone threw a ragged blanket over his head and back. Around him, buildings grunted and groaned, sunk foundations rising. The ground drew itself straight, healed its pits, cleared its gutters. The public pump spurted once, then flowed with crystal-clear water.

When he was done, it was well after midnight, the ramshackle neighbourhood was alive with grateful joy, and Detrich was so tired that Saul had to haul him up and turn him the right way home.

“It’s a small thing,” he mumbled, slumped back against the seat of the carriage that they took in the end. “It’s their power, not mine. I’m only the channel of their will. When I have to work through the web, on other cities, that will be harder. Much better to go out there in person. But the war, and this damned thing…” he rapped a fingertip against the cast on his leg. “When it’s off, I’ll take you outside the capitol. To see Hyem.”

At last, at the end of that week, a surgeon came — a different one than the one in Alsden. She was a short, pleasantly round woman who introduced herself as Hedi, Alamann’s aunt. Basholme had trailed along and also brought a bottle of Adalan whiskey: the type, Saul quickly gathered, that sat right on the edge between Detrich’s distaste for luxury and his appreciation of his friend, not to mention of Adalan whiskey. The three of them settled in the drawing room — Alamann and Mia, though invited, had chosen to go home for the night — and Detrich called Saul in and unceremoniously turned him over to Hedi to inspect from head to toe.

“Remarkable,” she said as she looked him over, nodding to herself. Saul was uneasy turning this way and that at her instruction, but the word mollified him a little. “The way young bodies recover. No match for it. You’ll catch up on your growth soon enough, and the process of physical maturation overall.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, wonders untold, lad,” Basholme said with a rumbling laugh, and Hedi blushed faintly and grinned. But Saul’s confused, half-hearted scowl in Detrich’s direction yielded nothing. The Land’s Own only looked coolly amused.

“Well, then.” Hedi rose from her seat and knelt before Detrich’s, leaning in for a look at the cast that he’d propped up on a stool. “It’s a little early, but perhaps not for a Guardian. You have no pain?”

“Only a pain in the neck. Get it off!”

“You can’t order your leg into healing faster,” Hedi protested, but did rise to get her bag of instruments. As she cut through the cast — clearly being too slow and cautious for Detrich’s liking — she asked, “And how are you sleeping?”

“No worse than usual.”

“The tonic I gave — “

“Useless. Just made my stomach ache.” He shook his head in dismissal. “Leave it. The sleeplessness isn’t half as much trouble as those cures.”

“Let’s see you say that when winter’s properly settled in,” Basholme grunted.

Detrich stabbed a finger into his shoulder. “Don’t you start too. What do you all want from me? At least Ander isn’t here to insist I be entirely swaddled.” He suddenly raised his eyes to Saul, beckoned him over with a wave of one hand. “What are you standing there for? Come have a seat. You’re the only one in this house who doesn’t have something to say about how I drive myself to an early grave.”

Uncertain, Saul crept closer; eventually he sat himself down on the edge of the couch’s arm, two feet away from where Basholme sat. He watched the Major and Land’s Own bicker all the while as Hedi finished her work. They exchanged barbs about each other’s health, about Basholme’s wife, about incidents from the time of the revolution. Hedi spoke up now and then, her tone long-suffering but not unhappy.

Basholme for his part had mastered long-suffering as an art. “The things I do for you, Detrich. I took Alsblich in a much worse autumn than this — “

“As I remember, Ander took Alsblich, after I had to blow up Skinner’s Bridge to save you and your cavalry from the mud — “

“I remember _you_ were stabbed and bedridden for three weeks with pneumatic fever,” Hedi put in as she pulled her scissors through the final inch of the cast, and finally began to ease the weight off the leg. Detrich watched her hungrily. “Festus, if you stand up, Sun help me — “

She pulled the last of the cast away. Detrich instantly pushed to his feet, both of them, then dropped back into the seat with a yowl of angry pain.

The sound made electric alarm race up Saul’s spine, but Basholme only laughed out loud. "I don’t know what I was expecting,” Hedi lamented, while Detrich hissed curses and probed the length of his bare calf with relentless fingers, twisting his foot to feel how badly the muscles had atrophied. When he tried to push himself up again, Basholme and Hedi just watched with wry smiles, so it fell to Saul to be ready to jump up in case Detrich stumbled.

“Sun’s sake, not you, too,” the Land’s Own grumbled at him as he found his balance, resting only a fraction of his weight on the tender limb, but the grumbling hid genuine delight. He limped around the room for a span while Hedi explained that the healing was not done and care still had to be taken and strength rebuilt slowly. Detrich seemed only half-listening, focused on movement, on freedom, on his own restless energy. It all but poured out of him. And Saul watched, and realized that he had never seen the man at his full strength and ability.

Detrich seemed to sense his gaze, stopped suddenly and returned it; a keen fire shimmered in the ocean blue of his eyes. And Saul thought, _Now we can fight._

After a time, Detrich finally seemed to tire himself out, returned to his seat, and offered Hedi his apologies and his thanks, both heartfelt. The surgeon accepted both with wry, practiced ease. Next he offered her the whiskey, which she took just as gladly. The three of them passed the bottle between them and drank without bothering with glasses. Saul sat in his corner and listened to them speak together about winter, about the agitation in the streets, about Basholme’s and Hedi’s sons who were almost of an age for the army. Then they began to speak of the revolution.

As the talk shifted, Saul found himself shifting also, moving minutely closer to the others. Hyemi or Ilyigan, war stories were war stories; old soldiers’ talk was all one. They spoke of danger outwitted, chances taken, moments that balanced life and death. Of nerves that held and nerves that broke, feats of skill, desperate scrambles, and inevitably of men who were dead. Detrich recounted a long tale, half in humour and half in time-dimmed grief, of a village girl who joined the ranks to be with a boy she loved, only to find that she was the superior markswoman while he was a much better nurse. “Not the happiest discovery for a bold young man, but their love survived it.” He looked down, into the neck of the almost drained bottle. “Not the fighting, though. Neither of them.”

“We lost good people,” Basholme said quietly.

Hedi nodded. “We lost our best.”

“We gained the world.” Detrich began to raise the bottle to tip back the last of the drink, only for Basholme to lean over and grab it, shaking his head. “In part, at least. It’s not finished. I’m not finished.”

“You’re finished with this.” Basholme pulled the bottle away; Detrich gave it up without rancour. He leaned a little to the side, bumping shoulders companionably with the Major, getting a faint smile from Hedi. Now sitting closer than he’d realized, closer than he had intended, Saul watched them. Their ease. He thought, _They love him._ And he thought, _I ought to ask him about Willie Arnbau._

But he didn’t; the words couldn’t find their order, their tone, or their way out. He sat and listened to the stories, hour after hour, in the rising and falling light of the hearth-fire, until all the clocks in the house tolled midnight.

A silence fell on the room. It lay there for a while, a strange mist of soundlessness, until Basholme yawned hugely and ambled to his feet and poked at the fire. Hedi joined him, her hands over the flames, and stayed there when he walked out to relieve himself. With the Major gone, she looked back at Detrich; softly, she said, “Festus, about the inquiry…”

Detrich was leaning back in his chair, eyes half-shut. He wasn’t quite drunk, Saul thought. Basholme had stopped him just short of it. Perhaps he was trying to fall asleep, in the warmth and the quiet, the presence of ones who loved him. But he sounded alert when he answered, “What about it?”

“Do you really believe it was Adalas? Behind the shooting?”

For a moment, Detrich was silent. Saul leaned in, aware that he was largely forgotten. He watched, until the Land’s Own, still resting back in almost alarming stillness, sketched a shrug. “Does it matter?”

Hedi lingered, looking at him, a long moment before turning her face to the fire.

In a lower voice, she said, “If Duke Stattenholme presents evidence — “

“I wouldn’t believe him.”

“Neither would I. But if there _is_ someone else, aren’t we being manipulated?”

“I’ve thought about it. There may be. But it’s hardly manipulation to send us to war with Adalas when that was our own aim to begin with.”

“War on false grounds seems… cruel.”

Detrich shrugged again. “What’s a kind war?”

Hedi hesitated. Opened her mouth, then closed it again. She frowned at the flames, rubbed her hands together, wrapped her arms around herself.

“I trust you,” she said, so low it was almost lost in the crackling flames; but Saul saw Detrich’s face, and knew that he heard.


	8. Power's Purpose

The next morning was sunny, and Detrich took one look out the window and said, “This will be the last warm day of the year. Come: we’re going to see my country.”

The air was radiant, crystalline with the lingering nighttime chill, the sunlight thrumming through it, the sky a tall mirror of blue. The city bustled with the hurried life of a clear day in autumn, but they left it behind and took horses at a postal station, rode along the river past the final yards of paving on its banks, past thickets of willows heavy with dew. Out into the open greenery of meadow and pasture, under spruce and elm and oak, through sleepy fields at last settled after the rush of late harvest, along pathways so thick with golden leaf-fall as to mute the passing of hooves. In Ilyiga, autumn was a green time, a breathing time, when rain finally washed away the thorns and hedges bristling yellow in the end-of-summer heat. Hyem was a different world.

Ilyiga was also a land of great cities, and Saul was a city boy, born and bred; but he liked the horizon that stretched away at every turn, the lazy roll of the hills and their crowns of birch stands. Wooden and stone fences looked flimsy snaking across the bowl of the earth under such an expanse of clear sky. He liked the air that was clear of any human smell, as though all of it was his to fill his young, eager body with. His horse was a calm beast, knowing its own pace under an inexperienced rider, and he liked that, too. They rode west, and the morning sun laid its hand upon his back and slipped its warmth under his Hyemi-cut jacket.

Detrich’s mount was of an entirely different mould, and he rode like a blaze of wind, up the hills and down the path and back again in spurts of gleeful speed. He had been a cavalry officer in his army days, he told Saul. And the Hyemi had been horseback warriors before they had become a landed nation. Before they were a nation at all. On the Dzirinian Steppes, five hundred years ago. They had hunted with eagles, he said, and he pointed out the silhouette of grand wings and a white tail soaring overhead. He explained how the terrain with its hills affected the use of cavalry, and about cannons and guns and how warfare had changed. Things were done very differently on the Ilyigan hills, Saul said in return, half in challenge; and before he knew it, they were comparing and arguing tactics, back and forth as they rode side by side.

The river drew a broad curve and forked around a hill, the southern course dipping into a gully thick with a red riot of rowan. They rode between chestnut trees, startling gray squirrels from under the dry leaf cover, and once a large fox that gave them an almost human baleful look. Detrich named half a dozen flowers and herbs in the undergrowth and whistled back at the ringing call of a bird that mocked them from the canopies. When the trees crowded thicker, the path before and behind almost vanishing, he stopped and had them dismount. While Saul rummaged for stones to throw at the squirrels, Detrich cleared a patch of ground and settled down on it, dug his fingers into the bare earth and sat a while in silence. He said nothing, did nothing; but the air of the woods trembled and stilled, grew swathed with a held-breath hush, then gradually rose again in a subtly changed song. The shift was not in any sense that Saul could place, not through his eyes or ears, nose or skin. But he knew that a new thread was in the skein of everything-and-all-around; and that the woods, too, knew that a human soul was brushing theirs.

He thought of olive groves, low and broad trees gnarled with age, silvery with pounding sunlight. Hardy scrub swallowing up and cracking through boulders of limestone. Little rills barely shaded by arbutus and terebinth. Another world. Ilyiga. Thought of sinking his own hands into the heavy gold of wet sand by the blue of the ocean. 

The moment passed. Detrich stood up and brushed his hands clean against his trousers. He looked thoughtful, distracted, but not displeased. He must have seen the shade passing over Saul’s face, that ghost of longing, because he briefly clasped his shoulder before they mounted up again.

A mile further on, near where the forks of the river joined up again, a stone wall more substantial than most enclosed a hill on top of which stood a mansion. Detrich led them to a gate, where a liveried man — like Duke Stattenholme’s guard, but in dull blue and cream — sprang out of a small shed and put himself at the Land’s Own’s service with distinct unease. “Sure you won’t come up to the house, Fro Detrich? She’ll be annoyed enough at your answer, I reckon, without trudging all the way down here.”

Detrich looked doubtfully up the neatly paved path to the mansion. “Would she give you trouble if we don’t?”

“Not me, but the kitchen girls, maybe, since she’s bound to take it out on someone…”

“We’ll come.” 

If anything, Saul suspected that whoever the woman was, she had just made the answer she would receive from her Land’s Own even less to her liking: Detrich’s eyes were cool and hard all the short way to the mansion doors. He let the groom that waited there take their horses to be watered, but shook his head when the liveried man invited them inside. “And tell her I don’t want her pastries, either.”

Saul did stick his head past the door as they waited, looking back and forth in fascination at the sumptuous interior, the paintings on the walls and the velvet draperies about the massive windows. “Who lives here?” He must have sounded a little too taken with the place, because Detrich gave him the gimlet eye before responding.

“Freiherrin Geitenholme owns much of the land we’ve travelled through this morning.” Detrich gestured outward, a broad sweep at the countryside. “Her home is beautiful. Decorated by the taxes of twenty thousand families.”

In some moments, the Freiherrin appeared, a woman of middling years dressed in velvet with a Western sundisk at her neck half again as big as the one Saul recalled seeing Duchess Stattenholme wear. The look she gave Saul dismissed him as less noteworthy than Detrich’s horse. She curtsied at Detrich, who returned a sharp nod of his head, and they settled into looking stiffly at each other for the next interminable thirty seconds.

The Freiherrin broke first, in the end. “Good morning, Land’s Own Guardian. I understand my kitchen does not tempt you.”

“No more than it did last year.”

“You have considered my petition, then.”

“And my answer is the same as last year.”

“Kind of you to come inform me in person.” Her mouth tightened.

“I thought if I did, perhaps next year you won’t try again.”

The Freiherrin heaved a sigh that made her sundisk shift and shimmer. “The countryside for miles will benefit from recovering the dyke. I know you agree on this. Why I cannot have your most minimal cooperation —”

Detrich’s eyes never warmed even a fraction. “You misunderstand our disagreement, Frowe Geitenholme. I agree that the dyke should be rebuilt; I don’t agree to do it for you by soul-power. You want the countryside to benefit? You own the countryside. Pay your workers their wages.”

“Workers would take so long. You could have it done in an afternoon.”

“They’d have been done by now if you’d begun after last year’s refusal.”

“Fro Detrich,” the Freiherrin said tightly. “You push me into petitioning Parliament to demand this of you, and as I hear it, you can ill afford that. You would have great use of my brother’s favour in the Upper House.”

“Hm,” Detrich said sharply. Quite suddenly, he looked at Saul, who blinked. “Tell me, lad,” he said. “Here we call it politics. But what is it called when someone promises a state official their favour in return for use of that official’s power?”

Saul knew very little about politics. But this, he caught. “Bribery.”

“Hm.” The Land’s Own’s voice sharpened another notch. Freiherren Geitenholme stared with wide eyes, with a twist to her mouth and an arching of her nostrils of one smelling something foul. Detrich looked away from her to the liveried man at her shoulder. “Indeed. We’re done here. Good fro, would you bring our horses?”

As they rode on, leaving gate and hill behind them, Saul turned the exchange over in his mind. He had no opinion about the question of the dyke: paying men to do the work seemed fair, but it also seemed a waste to have the power to do it all by oneself and not use it. He had resigned himself to not fully understanding why Detrich couldn’t just build his dyke and tell the Freiherrin that she had no rights in it. But something bothered him, still. Along a quiet stretch of road by a small irrigation canal, he asked, “But you  _ could  _ have used her brother’s favour?”

“Freiherr Geitenholme is a man of influence.” Detrich was half preoccupied with closely studying the flow of water in the channel. He spoke offhand. “It wouldn’t have hurt.”

“And could Parliament really force you to do what she asks?”

“Of course. What else do we have a parliament for? I’m not a Kaiser. I’m the Land’s Own Guardian. I do what the people will.”

He’d said it before, Saul thought, outside the beer hall in the market. About the will of the people. He’d meant it. “Why? You have the power. Why do you have to think of what this woman and the Duke and all the rest of them will do?”

Detrich gave him a look, suddenly more focused, holding Saul’s eye. For a moment they rode in silence.

“What do you think power is, lad?” he asked at last. Overhead, a flock of rooks, black and loud, burst from a golden canopy and scattered skyward. “A river is powerful. A thunderstorm, that has power. That is what some men wish to be. What’s the point of that? Power needs purpose. Men drown in unchecked power. Kaiser Freider sits all day in his garden and paints, while people in the slums of his capital starve. He was born to so much power, he has no idea what to do with it. It isn’t power that makes me Land’s Own. My people have. They are my purpose. All my power does nothing but serve that.”

He looked at Saul for a moment longer after that, but seemed to sense that he would get no immediate answer. They rode for a while more by the burbling canal, while Saul thought, rather despite himself, about Gabrello Attoré, and about the stories he’d heard from older men about the time before the war when Ilyiga had a Land’s Own Guardian. Finally he said, “But they are also your people. The Duke and those nobles that you’re fighting against.”

“They are. And that is why the fighting is in words, not guns.”

“In the revolution —”

“I wasn’t Land’s Own.”

“You didn’t want to be.”

“No.” A cloud drifted along overhead. The shadows it cast into the water were mirrored in the blue of Detrich’s eyes. “But I am. I hate them all and wish I’d killed more of them. But the revolution is over. And if the fighting began again… it would be civil war.”

His voice dropped very low with those words; there was a faint ring to them that Saul abruptly thought might be fear. And just as abruptly he realized again the depths he was seeing into, past Detrich’s unwavering brightness.  _ Basholme and Kirschen, Mia and the rest — they never see this. They don’t know.  _ The thought made him almost dizzy.  _ Why me? _

He wanted to ask, but again found he had no words to do it as he wanted. The cloud passed, and they followed the canal back to the river, and rode for another peaceful hour sharing a loaf of black bread and a small bag of sugared cranberries. Upstream, the river narrowed, and a handful of buildings came into view, built around a massive waterwheel.

It was larger than any that Saul had seen in Ilyiga, and in much better state; he was immediately drawn to it, its scale, the smooth artistry of its make. He made a sound of soft awe in his throat and spurred his horse on to look more closely. Detrich followed behind at an easier pace, visibly pleased with his ward’s fascination. He stopped his horse next to Saul’s and pointed out and named the parts of the mechanism, spoke about axles and head and volume, unknown words that Saul followed with both difficulty and delight. He further explained that the land here was owned and the mill built by an association of village men who had won that right after the revolution. “Neither Freiherrin Geitenholme nor any other highborn leech have any share in it,” he said with relish. “And while I live, they never will.”

To the side of the complex, fenced in its own little plot complete with a vegetable garden, was a small cottage. Presently a woman emerged from it to come up to them, a shaggy grey dog loping at her heel. She was old and squat, with bad teeth that showed in her broad smile, and Detrich hopped off the horse — entirely too casually on his healing leg — to clasp her hand and take her hearty pat on his back.

“Fro Detrich! if I’d known you were coming I’d have made a bigger meal.”

“Never mind it, we brought our own.” He gestured for Saul to dismount. “Saul, this is Frowe Lisel Furst; she manages the mill and her husband is its Guardian. Lisel — Saul, from Ilyiga. He isn’t allowed in your larder.”

Saul made a face at that, and Lisel blinked and looked up and down his rake-thin form, but didn’t question the instruction. She led them to the house, where the chimney — the height of unfairness — was puffing out the sweet white smoke of breadmaking.

“Marten’s gone upstream, taken the boys with him. Something about a tree collapsed into the water,” she said as they entered, Detrich ducking his head slightly under the door-beam. The cottage was small and neat, and smelled strongly of earth mingled with the scent of fresh baking. Outside Lisel’s oven, a great loaf of bread worked in intricate plaits was cooling, and a handful of small honey pastries like Mia’s next to it. “Thea is away with her soldier lad again. Thinks I don’t know what she’s up to. Do you need to sit down?” She looked a little uneasily at Detrich, who had knelt down to rub at his shin with a frown of half-pain, half-resentment. “Marten told us about your leg.”

“I’ve sat enough for three lifetimes. Has he told you the other news?”

“About Adalas? We know what was in last week’s paper, Thea’s soldier gave her a sheet. He’s very keen on a war on spring. Our boys, too. Ginner says, now you don’t need birth or wealth for an officer’s rank, this is his chance. He thinks he’ll take half of Adalas all by himself, be commissioned on the field, and marry a graf’s daughter if not a duke’s.”

“We don’t need half of Adalas, just the Essine. But he is eighteen this spring, isn’t he?”

While they spoke, Saul took step by creeping step towards the oven and its promise. The bread and fruit on the way were all good and well, but honey pastries were another matter entirely. He counted six; one would certainly be missed, with such a small number, but he thought he could blame it on the dog. As long as they were distracted, talking about village boys eager to go to war, and wouldn’t catch him in the act…

“— will come speak with him about it in the new year. But today I’m here about winter.” Detrich cast an assessing look around the small house, making Saul freeze. “What needs done?”

“Not much, happily. Autumn’s been mild. But if you could look at the mill pool — maybe help me with some of the roofs, while you’re here —?” Counting tasks on her fingers, Lisel led Detrich back out of the cottage, him following readily without as much as a glance back. Probably expected him to fall into lockstep, Saul thought, and didn’t. He had a feeling all that would yield were chores. Where he presently was, in the meantime, was ripe with promise. He wasn’t allowed in the larder — he knew better by now than to defy Detrich’s explicit instruction, and anyway that was for his own good — but the oven was right there before him, and the bread and pastries still warm. The grey dog tilted its head at him quizzically. If the thing started to bark he’d have to do something, but its rapping tail made it seem unconcerned enough. It was only a pastry. Any moment now someone might come. Quickly, quickly — any moment —

His hand was half an inch away from the pastry when the door opened, and Lisel loudly cleared her throat.

Saul whirled around. He felt an utter fool, not for being caught as such, but for having hesitated for so long. The miller’s eyes were narrowed and her mouth drawn in a hard line that forestalled any pleas of innocence. Saul’s nerves twitched. She was just an old woman, but there was a stick by the door that he thought she must use to beat the dog away from her kitchen, and —

Behind her, Detrich appeared, blocking the rest of the light from outside. He looked at Saul with one look that saw all, raised his eyebrows, then inclined his head.

“Try asking,” he said, his tone surprisingly neutral.

_ I’m not afraid of some old woman’s old stick!  _ Saul’s hungry stomach growled into his head. He shifted his feet. Swallowed.

He said, “I’m sorry, frowe. Can I have one?”

Lisel stared at him a moment longer, then gave a huffing laugh of disbelief. She came in wagging her finger and clucking her tongue. “No, you shameless brat, those are for the family. But you  _ are _ too thin, and I have other things. Do they have lavender cake in Ilyiga? I have some oatcakes, too, with honey if you like that…”

She walked past him and into the forbidden larder, muttering to herself. Saul raised his eyes to catch Detrich’s. The Land’s Own’s face had changed only a bare fraction, but that fraction was warm.

“Not so hard, was it, lad?”

“I won’t do it again if you laugh at me.”

“Hah,” Detrich said, suddenly immensely pleased. “Shameless. Eat your damned oatcakes and come help me with the roof tiles.”

The lavender cake, once Lisel proudly presented it, smelled entirely satisfying; even Detrich, once the miller nudged him to it, relented to break off a small piece. But just as Saul sank his teeth into the dense sweetness, the Land’s Own froze and grabbed at the table to steady himself. His eyes went very wide. Lisel let out a small cry of alarm.

“Oh — no — is it Marten?”

Detrich gave a twitch of a nod. “Not hurt. Calling for me. They’ve trouble.” He made to pull at Saul’s arm without looking, missed, and turned the gesture into an urgent wave of the hand. “Up, leave it, later. We need to go.”

“I’m hungr—”

“You’ll still be hungry when we’re back. Up!”

Saul fumed privately all through the dashing ride upstream, but the sight they finally came across drew his attention. In the middle of the quick, fierce current, the mass of a fallen tree, twice as tall and thick as a grown man, lay caught on some jutting rocks. A group of men was watching from the riverbank, five of them and with them a stout workhorse loaded with rope. Four conferred in sombre voices. The fifth, a youth around his own age, sat soaked to the bone and shivering, glaring at the tree as though it had done him an intimate wrong.

Detrich dismounted and hurried up to the group. “Marten!”

A stocky, grey-haired man turned from his fellows toward him. Marten’s face opened in visible relief at the sight of his Land’s Own Guardian. “Fro Detrich, Sun bless.”

“What’s the matter here? You can’t get the ropes secured?”

“We’ve had no luck, and I’m afraid we’ve only loosened it. Ginner tried to leap over across the stones with the ropes. Couldn’t make the first jump. We barely pulled him out.” Marten put a hand to his son’s shoulder; Ginner just mumbled resentment. “I daren’t have anyone else try.”

“If it comes loose —“

“Oh, my poor waterwheel — ”

“Let it come within sight of the mill, then use your power?”

“I don’t know if I’m fast enough. And even if I manage to shatter it, the pieces might still cause no end of trouble.”

Detrich raked a hand back through his hair, turned to look at the river with wary calculation. “I can try to raise the stones and make a path. But it might come loose from that…”

Saul looked at the river; looked at the log; looked at the mulling men and at Ginner sitting and scowling, useless. Looked at Detrich’s grim uncertainty.

He said, “I’ll do it.”

All gazes turned his way, surprised and instantly assessing. He knew what they saw: his small frame, still too small for his age. His foreign colouring. But he knew what he could do. No Tezzei man was worth the name who couldn’t leap from stone to stone across the whole lagoon. He pictured the amazement that would replace the surprise in those gazes, and went up to the workhorse to take the coiled ropes.

“I’ll do it, get those ready,” he said again, and handed one end of the coil to Detrich.

The Land’s Own hesitated a moment, frowning. At his shoulder, Marten looked openly worried. “You? How old are you?”

“What does it matter? I’m light and fast. Faster than your boy there.”

Ginner snorted. “Your arms are like twigs!”

“When I come back I’ll break your nose with those twigs.” Saul tied the rope haphazardly around his own waist. He didn’t feel the need, but it might make the men less reluctant. “Get moving.”

Detrich met his eyes, and said only, “Go on, Saul.”

Once decided, the men made quick work of tying the ropes to the three horses’ saddles, then getting into their own positions. Saul walked some distance back from the water’s edge. Breathed in. Rolled his shoulders in their sockets. Shifted onto his back foot, took a running start.

He leapt. Touched lightly off one rock, pushed off another. Water sprayed in his face. He was on the log.

A chorus of cries rose from the bank. Saul’s heart beat quick and fierce in his chest. The wood was slimy with moss, the bark peeling off against his palms, and he could feel the whole thing shift and groan under his weight. Hollow, he realized after a moment. He was lucky to have landed without going through the rot; a patch under his foot would yield any moment now. He slipped a loop of rope off his shoulder and set to tie it to a branch.

The men on the bank continued to shout. Some were perhaps yelling encouragement, though Saul barely heard. The current roared around him. This was not the peaceful green of the Tezzei lagoon or its narrow and overgrown canals. He tied off another knot, leaned down to brace himself as he crept up the log toward another likely branch. The log creaked ponderously, then, as he shifted his weight, began to sway left and right. 

_ It’s coming loose _ . He could’ve held on, but he needed his hands free for the ropes…

A low burning began in his muscles, building through the struggle to keep his footing, and his breath was fast and mind crystal-clear. He tied the third rope and tried to lean to one side to compensate for the log’s pitching, only to find he’d overbalanced. A crack sounded over the rushing water. The end that Saul stood on pitched violently upward, and he threw himself down and clung on as the whole mass began to roll. It was loose. It was going. Into the river, fast and more merciless than any battle. He had moments to finish —

He glanced over his shoulder. Caught sight, on the bank, of Detrich breaking away from his fixated watching to exchange brief glances with the men. Then the Land’s Own knelt down and put both hands into the river. Something thrummed through the water. Some power sang.

The current slowed.

Saul did not know, could not begin to guess what kind of power it took to hold back the might of the river. He didn’t linger on it. Tearing his eyes from Detrich’s, he found his balance again. He slipped the rope off his waist, lay himself flat to secure a final loop around the centre of the log’s bulk. And he held on.

“ _ Pull!”  _ Marten bellowed at his men.

The river fought them for every inch, swollen with autumn rain and, Saul thought, perhaps angry to have been restrained by human hands. But at last the log was heaved against and up the bank, and Saul rolled off and sat up, wet, breathless, and floating on the aftertaste of action and excitement. He swept his waterlogged bangs out of his eyes and turned to look at Detrich. The Land’s Own had collapsed into a slumped sitting position, equally winded, but at the look he leaned over, grinning fiercely, and clasped Saul’s shoulder twice as tight as he had before.

“Beautifully done — beautiful. You’re a marvel, lad.” His voice carried, the praise meant for the whole group to hear. Marten and his men hardly needed the encouragement. They pulled both of them up and thronged around them, all thundering cheers and thumps on the back. Saul didn’t even mind those. Detrich’s hand was still on his upper arm. The rest he took benignly as his due, even deigning to leave Ginner’s nose unbroken when the youth said it was lucky that Saul was so small.

They headed back downstream through the sun-drenched fields in high cheer. The other men in the party peeled off after a while, leaving Marten and his sons, both of whom walked by Saul’s horse and asked him a hundred questions. Once they realized who and what he was, all their questions were about war. Ginner wanted to serve his country in glory; his brother Markus, who had an ugly squint and a bad stutter, wanted just enough glory for the village girls to favour him. They looked at Saul with the same saucer-wide eyes and hopeful almost-smiles that the younger boys in his unit had had. They asked him if he’d killed many men; he told them he’d lost count, but did remember the best kills. They drank in his tales of ambushes, of ring battles with other young commanders, of feigning injury only to stab a captor in the night. But when he told them of setting a whole village to the torch they lost their appetite for it. He wasn’t surprised.  _ They’re only boys. _

Back at the mill, Marten recounted events to his wife with great relish. What was more important, he gave Saul his honey pastry — Detrich staunchly refused to take Lisel’s — and asked if he could do more. Saul thought about it for a moment, then said, “Show me your Guardian’s power.”

Marten’s face split with a great grin. “Come outside.”

He led Saul a little away from the main complex, the two of them alone, Detrich having stayed with Lisel and the roofs in need of mending. There, Saul was surprised — and not a little suspicious — when the old Guardian produced a wood-carving knife from his belt and handed it over, saying, “I heard you can fight. Take ten steps back and come at me.”

“Really?”

“It’s the best way for you to understand.”

Saul shrugged, took his steps, and charged forward.

Two steps in, Marten barked out:  _ “Fall!” _

And Saul did. Not lightly, not a mere stumble. He crashed, not forwards but  _ backwards _ , as though the Mill Guardian’s voice had a physical force to it that punched against the centre of his body. It left him stunned, briefly too much so to breathe. When he finally sucked in air it was with a desperate reedy sound; he let it out on a string of curses in Ilyigan.

“Sun’s  _ blood!” _ As he sat up his breastbone still felt as though it was reverberating with the shouted command. He didn’t care if the old man could see his astonishment. “Can you order anyone to do anything? Could you say,  _ die, _ and I’d just lie down and — and be dead?”

Marten scratched his beard at that, his proud smile fading slightly. “Never thought to try. The soul-power in my voice might stop a heart, I suppose. But it’d be the force of it, not the command… I think. Ask Fro Detrich. He knows about such things.”

“He knows everything,” Saul said offhand. “How did you get a power like that?”

“From the mill.” Marten’s face softened. He glanced back over his shoulder at the waterwheel with the look of a man gazing upon a favourite child. “It belongs to the milling society, but I led the construction. They picked me to look after it. Sold my mother’s only ring, the ring I wed Lisel with, to put in my share. Two weeks after we finished, the Geitenholmes sent their thugs to burn it down. Six men with guns in the dead of night, and me and Markus here with a pitchfork and a rusty sword I took off a dead man in the revolution. But something beastly happened in me that night. I killed four of them, sent the other two running. No one’s bothered us since.”

“And that’s how you became a Guardian?”

“You’d think so, eh? But no. Nothing happened until the trial. I’d killed four men — was charged with murder, and poor Markus with unlawful violence. They dragged us up — sat us down in the capitol’s grand courthouse — before the judge and the nobles and the city folk, all those rich men, great men, and me and my boy as you see us. I had to speak up before all of them, Sun’s grace! That was real fear. Much worse than the fight. Thought my old heart would burst. But I spoke — I had to speak — and they listened! They listened! I made them listen! They heard my voice and set us free. Gave us justice, for me, for Markus, for the mill and all of us.

_ “That _ was how I became a Guardian. The mill is my Centre and my soul is bound with it. While I see it stand, I have the power to protect it.”

The old man’s eyes were shining — with tears, Saul thought at the first moment, but not merely that. He knew the brilliance that had settled about Marten. He’d seen it draped like a cloak over Alsie in the marketplace. This was what being a Guardian meant. That certainty. That knowledge of one’s power. That way of standing, as though one was the eye of the wild world’s storm.

There had been Guardians in Ilyiga once. When there had been a Land’s Own, and a healthy web of souls and their power. Once, before the Covenants turned on one another, and the careful hundred-year balance of Saul’s homeland — with its two faiths, its four peoples, its hundred rival cities — had collapsed into war. Now there were only steel and gunpowder, and whatever it was that made soldiers follow a commander.

Those could make a man powerful. And he could lose them all in a day.

He looked back up at Marten’s smile. He thought,  _ I want to kill him. _

But the thought didn’t go anywhere, just as his wish to kill Duke Stattenholme hadn’t. It would solve nothing, end nothing except very likely his own life. Detrich would not forgive the death of this man.  _ His Guardian _ . Marten was his Guardian of Hyem, and Saul was…

He didn’t know; he didn’t want to think about it. Instead he asked, “How many Guardians are there in Hyem?”

“Thousands, I suppose. Fewer than there should be. Many died in the revolution with the old Land’s Own.”

“Are they all as powerful as you?”

“Me? I’m not powerful. I’m only a local Guardian. The ones that Fro Detrich has serving in the capitol, now…” and he told Saul of men who rode spirit-steeds and women who called up swords of blazing soul-power, until Ginner came running up and conveyed his mother’s scolding for being late to the midday meal.

They ate on the cottage’s little porch, enjoying the afternoon sunshine that almost echoed summer. Detrich pled contentment with his bread and fruit, but allowed Saul to take the plate of eggs fried in fat that Lisel offered him. Saul quickly decided that he liked her cooking even better than Mia’s; she used more fat, that was sure. The river sang and the waterwheel spun easily, and the air carried the scent of wheat being ground into fresh flour. Saul leaned back in his chair and halfway listened to Detrich and Marten talk about winter repairs, the mill’s finances, and village gossip, a hundred ordinary things.

“Are you riding back today? Or carrying on to Wilseburn?”

“That wasn’t my plan, though come to think of it, I haven’t at the river lock since last autumn.”

“I have a delivery to make there.” Marten glanced over to the storehouse. “I meant to go tomorrow, but if you’re traveling with me, we can be there tonight not long after dark.”

“Not a bad idea.” Detrich hummed in thought. “Our horses are due back at the posting station...”

“Thea’s soldier lad can take them back for you. It’s his last day of leave.”

Lisel broke in with a huff, “And that is still no reason to sneak off.”

Her sons both nodded, adamant, though Marten only waved a hand. “Thea is a good girl. I trust she won’t shame us. And who knows what would become of him, in the war?” He glanced uneasily at Detrich. “Meaning no trouble, Land’s Own.”

“No,” Detrich said, very quiet. “You aren’t wrong. Who knows?”

“Just so.” Marten nodded once, firmly; then added in a lower voice, “Though I can’t say it’s proper altogether. A lad from another province, a city boy at that, and she turning her nose up at every young man in our own village… perhaps you could have a word…?”

“A sixteen-year-old girl, in autumn love with a handsome soldier? A Land’s Own won’t do, you need a real sorcerer.” Detrich shook his head, and halfway smiled. “Let her dream. Let her wish for greater things. What else did we have a revolution for?”

Marten’s answering smile was a touch rueful at that, but he said nothing. Saul had hoped to ask him more about his power after the meal, but now there was the trip and delivery to arrange, and the family all pitched in to help with that work. Instead, he followed Detrich a way upstream to inspect the millpond. All the way, his mind drifted among the river sounds and the scents of reaped wheat and the stories of Hyem’s Guardians. Thousands of them across the country. Each worth a dozen soldiers and more —  _ even soldiers as strong as me _ .

And Detrich commanded them all.  _ But he would say, it isn’t his power, it belongs to the people… _

Then the pond came into view and stopped all his thoughts.

A pond was a misnomer. The channel from the river led to a weir some hundred yards across, and past it a great reservoir, mirror-smooth. It lay all silvered in the light of early afternoon, bordered by bulrush and ribbonweed, redolent of freshness and green. It was nothing like the sea, nor even the Tezzei lagoon; but Saul’s heart saw the expanse of water, and beat one beat of broken-glass pain.

He wanted nothing to do with that. He hopped onto the first stone of the weir, ahead of Detrich, who picked his way about the pond with care. The Land’s Own picked a flat rock and sat down on it to pull off his boots and socks. He slid his bare feet into the water while Saul leapt across the weir, to the far end and back again.

He looked up when Saul stepped onto the rock next to him. “Like it, do you?”

“It’s bigger than I thought it’d be.”

“I keep forgetting you’re a city boy.” Detrich leaned down, gently swung a hand into the sun-warmed water. Eddies formed around his fingers, rings spreading out and out. “This is Hyem. It’s easy to forget, in the capitol. Parliament, politics, the Kaiser, they can seem like all there is to the world. All that truly matters. But  _ this _ is Hyem, these people, these homes. This work, bringing bread out from earth and water, this fight…”

Saul dropped to a crouch. “It’s not fighting, just work.”

“No?” Detrich eyed him. “What you did earlier, that wasn’t a fight?”

“Fighting what? The river?”

“The river. The soil. The weather, often as not. Pests. Disease. The people who come in when the work is done and take the money and the credit, and say they own you, and can sell you if they wish…” Detrich kept looking at him; Saul knew that the Land’s Own saw him stiffen at those last words. “It’s a fight. Even Ander and Gus don’t always understand what it’s like, to be born to it.” He looked away from Saul and stared out across the pond, to the far bank, curtained by the fronds of trailing willows. “To grow up fighting.”

His gaze grew curtained too, then. That look of shadowing memory. Saul watched, and another urge came on him, sudden and strange, perhaps the strangest yet: the urge to ask, not about the villagers, or the war, or Willie Arnbau — but about Detrich himself. The man who knew everything, but whom Saul barely knew.  _ Who are you? What do you see, when you look inside like that? When you look at me? _

“Do you like it here?” he asked in the end, lower than he’d intended.

“I do.” Detrich’s voice was lower yet. “The capitol is my home. But this place, these people, it’s… simple, here.”

Then he seemed to shake himself out of the moment, and waved an impatient hand at Saul. “Now keep yourself busy and let me work. Water is much harder than earth.”

He leaned down to put his hands into the pond again and closed his eyes, and soon his breathing became deep and very slow as it had when he worked on the capitol slum. Ripples rose faintly across the water, but Saul could see nothing more. He sat for a little while yet, anyway. Thinking:  _ water is much harder than earth.  _ How much power  _ had _ Detrich chosen to use, to hold back the river and keep him afloat, maybe alive?

His head felt heavy again, thinking about it. So he got up and hopped across the weir, to the other end of the millpond and back, as light as a much younger boy. He crouched on a rock in the middle of the chain and tried for a while to skip stones across the water. He hadn’t done it in years; he failed a dozen times before finally deciding that freshwater must have a different trick to it than salt.  _ Detrich would know.  _ It was both easy and hard to imagine.

The ripples had quieted. His reflection stared up at him from the water: still thin but no longer gaunt. Gold threaded faintly into the straw of his hair. Cleaner than he thought he’d ever been in his life, certainly since leaving his grandfather’s house. It was a fight, Detrich had said, but there was no fight here and now. Only the sun and the water.

Saul put a hand into the pond and, satisfied, pulled off his shirt.

Just then, Detrich opened his eyes again, looked over and blinked. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Going for a swim.” The shirt’s collar wasn’t made for just slipping off; Saul at last had to succumb to undoing its buttons. His boots, too, needed proper unlacing. The Hyemi were mad. “It’s not too cold. Just barely.”

“We don’t have time for this. We should be going back.”

“Is Marten calling you?”

“No, but there’s work we could help with. We didn’t come here for our leisure.”

“Just half an hour.” The trousers fought him least. Saul honoured that by folding them neatly. “I’ve worked today already.”

“That isn’t how it’s — “ Detrich hesitated. Saul used that opportunity to leap right in.

‘Just barely’ had been the correct estimation. The water certainly felt like autumn — Hyemi autumn, which was Ilyigan early winter. But Saul had swam in the Tezzei lagoon in every kind of weather, and the shock of cold immersion all over his body was sweetly familiar. It wasn’t safe, swimming for swimming’s sake, not when one was alone and weak from hunger and always on the move. He hadn’t done it in months. The millpond wasn’t the sea, was nothing like the sea; nothing else could be what the sea was. But the water surrounded and held him like an embrace.

He kicked up, stretched back, moved his arms and legs as little as he could. Floated on his back staring up at the sun-flooded sky, a different shade of blue than Ilyiga’s, but blue nonetheless.

Detrich watched him in a wry silence, but not a critical one. His bare feet were still dangling in the water. Saul drifted over. “Are you coming in?”

“No.” Detrich shifted one foot away. Saul thought idly of pulling at his trouser leg, when he grudgingly said, “I can’t swim.”

“What?”

“I can’t swim.” The mere act of admitting it seemed to rankle the Land’s Own to no end. He growled, “Where would I have learned? My village was miles from the river. No one knew how, and no one thought anyone needed to.”

Saul was still stuck on his initial moment of bafflement. He could barely imagine a place where no one thought it important to know how to swim. Perhaps he should’ve crowed about it — at last, a place where he had Detrich definitely bested — but it couldn’t stand. “I’ll show you how. Come in.”

“What?”

“It’s simple. I learned before I could walk. Come in, I’ll show you.”

Detrich’s blunt confusion was better than any irritation at Saul’s gloating might have been. He stared at the water for a long time, a very ordinary look of wary suspicion. Then he stared again at Saul, who cocked his head, saying without saying,  _ Not afraid, are you? _

Detrich’s nostrils flared and his mouth twisted. He stood up, almost primly, and began unbuttoning his jacket.

He undressed with slow attention. Saul didn’t quite watch, but his eyes were drawn to the Land’s Own’s tall, trim form as the ever-present officer’s uniform was put aside. For all his deskwork, Detrich was a fighting man, fit and leanly muscled. Scars showed here and there on his torso, and more on his back when he turned. Three along his spine stood out most, puckered gouges where bullets must have been inexpertly dug out; across and between them were fainter thin lines of the sort left by a whip. They were pale against the copper-brown of his skin, stark, ugly.

The questions crowded inside Saul’s throat, but he suspected that any one of them would have Detrich putting his shirt back on. Instead he kicked off the rock and paddled about while Detrich tested the cold of the water with a hand and a hesitant scowl — as though his feet hadn’t been dangling in it just moments ago — then, very slowly, eased himself in.

“There, now watch me.”

“It  _ is _ cold, you brat,” Detrich complained; but he did watch, and in no time at all had grasped the heart of the matter. He pushed away from the rock, moving in powerful, methodical strokes, and Saul drifted idly beside him as he set about crossing the pond as though conquering it as he went.

On the way back he was fast and sure, already moving as though he’d had the skill for years; he even risked a dive, though he came up from it sputtering, making Saul laugh. Detrich looked sidelong at him from under his heavy wet hair, but didn’t protest. He pulled himself up onto his flat rock and set to wring out his ponytail.

“This was easier than I expected,” he said, half to the water itself.

Saul leaned against the next rock over. “Hyem and Adalas have a river border. Didn’t you fight on the river? How can you be an officer and not swim?”

“By being a cavalry officer.” This with a note of resentment. But Detrich stopped and looked thoughtfully across the pond. “I thought one had to learn young, I suppose.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty-five this month.”

Younger than Saul had thought, though he nodded. “That  _ is  _ old.”

That got him one of Detrich’s wry half-smiles. “Only boys your age think so.”

“It’s the truth. In the army — in Attoré’s army, most of the other commanders were younger —” 

“That is Ilyiga,” Detrich said simply. “This is Hyem.”

Saul blinked, and again, startled and unsure why.  _ This is Hyem _ . He was in Hyem.  _ Will I be thirty-five someday? _

That, of all thoughts, he couldn’t shake off. Not on the walk back to the mill, nor when Marten saw him and Detrich come back with damp hair and clothes and gave them an odd look. It fluttered about in his mind when he was pressed into joining Ginner in loading heavy sacks of freshly ground flour onto an oxcart, while Detrich made a last inspection of the complex and lavished Lisel with praise for its state of good repair. He thought about it as the old miller pressed a sweetly smelling bundle into his hands and told him he was welcome back anytime, at the Land’s Own’s side or not, as she patted his arm and said that he should eat and grow and become the strong, handsome man he was sure to someday be. It was obvious — time was obvious. Anyone who was born, given time, would make it from sixteen to thirty-five. And yet he’d never thought about it. Never thought about being given time.

He settled in the back of the cart next to Detrich, and Marten called to his ox and snapped his whip in the air. The beast set an unhurried rhythm. Bit by bit, the mill grew smaller, even the great, wondrous wheel vanishing into the distance. Saul watched until it was gone. The bundle Lisel had given him turned out to contain a fresh load of her plaited bread, still warm; he tore off a large piece and thought,  _ Maybe I will come back _ .

The sky was purpling gently, a dusting of sunset-pink behind feathery clouds. The river sang its ancient song. When Saul stretched, his limbs were pleasantly weighed with the sweet weariness of the swim. He tore another chunk from the loaf and turned to offer it, but found no recipient for his kindness: leaning back against the sacks of flour, rocked by the slow pace of the oxcart, Festus Detrich slept like a child.


	9. Summersclose

Summersclose dawned grey and drizzling, as if in physical proof that the Unconquered Sun had begun His long sojourn through the mists of the Underworld. Having kept his night-long prayer vigil, Saul was tired and yawning when Major Basholme came to collect him from the Land’s Own Guardian’s house. But he sharpened, coming down the stairs. He had not been to a temple in months; he hoped that the Hyemi sacerdote would speak clearly and have no difficult accent, that the hymns had the same music if not words, and that his new clothes were good enough to turn up in. Basholme was in dress uniform, and over it the sleeveless red vest of a votary soldier. Saul eyed him with envy; all he had was a tatty red scarf to tie about his arm, borrowed from Mia no less.

Basholme said nothing to that, though, for once sombrely quiet as they made their way through the streets thick with fog. The Major’s sons had arrived with him, but had gone ahead, the elder shepherding his chattering younger brothers. When they were out of sight, Basholme slowed down and gave Saul a long lookover.

“You do know how to behave yourself in a temple? We don’t wave our swords about and call for death to the Westerner heretics here. This is Hyem.”

“I know.” It was strange, of course, this sedateness. But no stranger than a hundred other things. “You _are_ all heretics, really.”

Basholme blinked, then laughed so suddenly that Saul jumped. “Nervous, are you, you hideous little creature.”

“Why would I be nervous?”

“It’s as clear as the nose on your face. You don’t care about what we faithless Hyemi think of you — do you care what _anyone_ thinks of you? But Father Sun, now, can’t look the fool before _Him_.” He kept his teeth bared in a grin. Saul looked away, knowing that his face was heating and debating whether he would find his way to the temple alone if he gave in to the urge to kick the Major under his ribs. “But you must’ve done well on the trip to Wilseburn, or Festus would not have let you out of his sight. If he thinks you’re tame enough to be seen in public…”

“I’m not a dog he’s ‘taming’.” _He’d never have said that._

To his surprise, Basholme’s head drew back, as though the man were reluctantly impressed. “True. True enough. He’d be appalled at me.” The words were low, but loud enough for Saul to hear. They sounded almost contrite. “What would you like better? A recruit ready not to shoot his own head off?”

“I can shoot _your_ head off —”

Basholme laughed again. “Now there’s why he likes you so well.” He glanced over his shoulder, back the way they came, and once more lowered his voice. “How is Festus? Using the cane again, I saw.”

“He overdid it going to Wilseburn. Treating the leg like it was good as new was stupid.”

“The usual, then.” The Major sighed. “I suppose It’s good that you learn how he is.”

“Is he always like that? Is that why he doesn’t sleep?”

“Oh, always. Often he’s worse. The insomnia, well, no one knows — he claims it’s been so all his life, but Hedi calls it a kind of sickness. It’s all a kind of sickness if you ask me. That — hrmpf — that _fire_ , packed under a man’s skin.” He huffed a heavy sigh. “Conflagrations burn out quickly. Festus set this whole country ablaze once. Now he wants to do it again, and Sun knows what would be left of him afterward.” But even as he spoke, Basholme’s eyes were shining; his voice was soft with awe.

Saul looked away again. The thought that had come to him on the night of Hedi’s visit rose once more, needling and strange. _They love him_. And in its wake, the yet-stranger urge, the thought that he did not truly know…

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

“Why is he…” _Who is he?_ “Stattenholme said he was nothing. That he was a drunkard’s son and a swineherd and a mutineer and never got promoted to any real rank —” _and hanged his own man and wasn’t any different from Gabrello Attoré —_

The words died in his throat. Basholme was looking at him oddly. The Major came to a stop and put his hand to the pommel of his sword, looked forward into the fog, the soft paleness that muffled the world.

“I’ve known Festus since before the revolution,” he said, his rumbling voice so quiet it was almost a shiver through the air. “I’d gladly die for him. Turn on my oaths and my Kaiser for him, again. Ander would burn down the world to give him the ashes. His Guardians — Hedi — Mia and Alamann — nine million souls love that man, damn him. But there are places in him none of us can reach. Things none of us touch. Why —” Another huff. He shook his head. “Maybe it has to be so, with a Land’s Own. What do I know? I’m only a man. A soldier. I get my orders and I fight. And he is — what he is.”

As non-answers went, it was an impressive one. Saul swallowed down the question that prickled stubbornly on his lips: _And me? What am I to him?_ Instead of speaking, he looked up to see the temple emerge from the mist.

It was small, which was no real surprise; in the capitol, Detrich had said, a bare one man in ten followed the Eastern Covenant. And this was not the grand temple but the soldiers’ temple, where the altar stood for only one of the god’s five faces. But it was neat, and crowded, and everything that Saul recognized in a temple: the façade with its three doors and five gilded peaks; the bronze bulls, rearing to either side of the sacerdotes’ entrance; the lens window that caught the scant light to cast it at the altar’s golden sunburst. The milling crowd too was a familiar scene, votaries in red and sacral widows in ash-painted robes, carrying their offerings — flowers here, rather than the olive branches that Saul was used to. The tiny difference shook him out of the moment. _This is Hyem_.

Basholme’s little daughter emerged from the throng, beaming and pulling her mother by the hand. Her eldest brother lifted her up so she could place a crown of flowers on his head. The family stood together, idly chatting as they waited for the doors to open. Saul slipped off to the side. By the men’s door, a gaggle of younger, unmarried soldiers was already waiting, eager to be the first inside and first to be sprinkled with the blood of the Summersclose sacrifice. It was good luck especially for an unmarried fighting man, called for the god’s attention, His minding. Against an ignoble death in the winter cold; for a bloody glory in summertime, either in a wife’s childbed, or on the battlefield.

The Hyemi soldiers gave Saul odd looks. Clearly, there was an order here he was a stranger to. He shoved about enough to make it plain to them that he didn’t care, but didn’t fight too hard for a place right by the door. When he’d last come to a temple to pray, all had moved aside for him; now he wasn’t sure what he wanted of that first blood. If it could offer him anything at all.

 _Bloody glory on the battlefield_ . He didn’t need the god to have that. _What do I owe the Sun of Ilyiga?_

And this was Hyem; but it was the rite he knew. A bell tolled and the doors swung open. Awash in final murmurs, the crowd parted and filed in, men to the right and women to the left. They lined up in two neat rows along the trenches to either side of the temple’s central water channel. At the front, before the altar under its sunburst, the acolytes stood singing the holy day’s Sunrise Song. Within moments, all were arranged in their places, all went to one knee and put their brows to their raised kneecaps. The song progressed towards its zenith, and Saul could hear the footsteps of the sacerdote coming up to the altar, the sound of blood sloshing in its golden bowl.

The song thrummed in his bones, pulled at the back of his throat, at his lungs and his tongue. He knew it so well. The sacerdote stopped before the altar, and intoned the first blessing into the music. Saul kept his eyes tightly closed, the darkness behind his eyelids more void than dark. _First there was Darkness, and in the Blood there came Light…_

The singing stopped. The first blessing ended. He raised his head just as the sacerdote swung his brush — flowers for an olive branch again — through the bowl and spattered the crowd with the blood of the sacrifice.

_Through the Blood of Birth and Battle, from Death unto Life, we bless the setting and the rising…_

The droplets were hot on his face. Around him the crowd was rising, tilting their heads back, opening their mouths. Singing — the words in Hyemi, but to music he knew. _We shall rise, we shall rise, we shall rise…_

 _What do I owe the sacerdotes in Ilyiga?_ He’d fought for them, in the war that he never really believed the god had willed, and in return, a sacerdote had torn the Tezzei glass from his wrist. But the Sun was everywhere, watching over every land. _He sees me, He knows me. He will give me war…_

Or Detrich would.

The sacerdote spoke for a while after the blessings were complete, though Saul only half listened, his head full of music. The bulk of the speech was the rote of Summersclose admonition, to reflect upon one’s heart in the dark months when the Sun roved through the underworld and to choose virtue and life. The rest was exhorting the faithful soldiers of Hyem to be patient and hold fast until the season of war, and to stand by their brothers who worshipped “the same Shining Father, if in a different guise.” A collection was passed for widows and orphans of the revolution, a sunset hymn followed, and the service closed. It was only when Saul went back outside with the rest of the crowd, when the wet coolness of rain hit his face, that he realized that the men around him were talking politics. The women, too, all in low voices, surreptitious yet eager. The sacerdote’s speech had held more meaning for the Hyemi than he’d realized. All around him, it was _Patience, patience for the season of war._

He looked about for Basholme, saw him with his family, laughing at his little daughter looking for omens in the blood that dotted her brothers’ faces. In Ilyiga, the rain washing that blood away so soon would have been a bad one. But this was Hyem. The press of the crowd was getting stifling, so Saul moved away, walked a short distance down the street and turned a corner.

And came face to face with Duke Stattenholme.

The Duke cut a strange shape in his oiled cloak, all black with no silver. Vestgaard was at his right shoulder, squinting ominously from under thick brows. The Duchess’s man wore a sunburst pin, Saul noted in surprise; it didn’t seem likely that he’d come to pray.

“Young general,” the Duke greeted him, tilting his hat back a touch to better meet Saul’s eyes. “A warm Summersclose to you.”

Saul looked at him warily, though he did nod at Vestgaard, fighting man to fighting man outside the soldiers’ temple. A flicker of amusement seemed to cross the Duke’s face at that, and he said, “Devotion is a handsome thing, even when misaimed.”

“If you want to die like a heretic —”

The Duke held his hands up, palms out. “Peace. That was unbecoming of me. I was only reflecting on whether you have thought further on our previous conversation.”

His tone was slow and deliberate, and Saul didn’t like it. The Duke, he thought, was aware that he was in no position to try to gain Saul’s loyalty or favour, and aware that Saul knew this as well And the result was a tangle of suspicion and intent that just made him wish for a knife in his hand. He wondered if that was how Detrich felt, dealing with the man. Then he thought that the Duke probably wielded this exact kind of frustration as one of his choicest weapons. Since he didn’t wield any actual weapons. That made things easier to respond tp. “I don’t care what you want from me,” he said flatly and made to turn around.

Behind him, Stattenholme said, “Did you ask him?”

Saul froze. For a moment he didn’t move, didn’t quite see the street before him. The Duke spoke again in a low voice: “I did not take you for a coward.”

The rain pelted Saul’s face. A shiver of cold ran through him for all the warmth of his Hyemi-cut clothes. Emen Stattenholme continued to speak. “I don’t want your loyalty. I don’t care what you make of me. But I know what Detrich makes of _you_. I know that he will use you to instigate his war, this war that I am desperate to stop. He will use you to fight his enemies, and if you fancy that he will ever give you aid in fighting yours, well —”

“My enemies?”

“Have you made peace with exile so soon?”

Saul whipped around, wide-eyed. As he met Stattenholme’s eyes, the Duke nodded. “You know that Attoré believes Hyem meddles in the Ilyigan war.”

“He was always talking about it.”

“He is wrong, but his belief has its reasons. Every country on this continent is afraid of what happened in Hyem two years ago. Of the revolution and its consequences. Of Festus Detrich.” The Duke took a step forward, and another. “Every ruler, every powerful man along our borders knows that Hyem’s Land’s Own Guardian is a wildfire, just looking for the next conflict to throw his people into. Every single one of them would rest easier with his neck in the noose it deserves. Do you want to buy your way back into Attoré’s good graces — back home? His head will make ample pay.”

He stopped where he stood, eyes bright and hard. Saul’s heart hammered in his chest. His eyes, the tips of his fingers seemed to pulse a roaring of blood. _Back home_ . If it were possible — _if it were possible_ —

“Attoré doesn’t want me as his soldier,” he rasped.

Stattenholme gave his head one jerking shake. “It needn’t matter. You can return to Ilyiga and be whatever else you wish to be.”

 _Whatever else you wish to be_ . Some cold spell cracked and broke. _What could you be in peacetime, little general?_

A brilliance convulsed across the sky. Thunder followed the lightning strike, and the rain redoubled its pounding, a howl of wind sweeping through the street at Saul’s back. The Duke grimaced and pulled his hat down again. “I do not expect you to make such a call at once. But you know where to find me. Think of it. Winter will give you time.” Turning to leave, he cast back over his shoulder, “You could be in Tezzei by springtime.”

With that, he and Vestgaard were gone into the storm, leaving Saul to stand and get soaked to the bone as he tried to breathe.

Back home. Tezzei by springtime. The green lagoon under a blue sky as rich as wine, the smell of wild roses and orchids everywhere. The Inner Sea, endless and azure, sparkling under his stolen sailboat like gold. The Hyemi millpond, with its mournful willows, mirror-smooth over the darkness of its depths, could never compare. Though its water had embraced him, soothing in its coolness. Though Detrich had pulled back the river for him, and —

 _Whatever else you wish to be._ And Detrich had said, _I want you to be my soldier._

The sudden sound of Basholme’s grumbling voice over the rain startled him back to the here and now. The Major was calling his name, appending to it rich oaths and making asides to his wife about hanging the Ilyigan brat to dry by his ears. Saul turned back to the main street. There was nothing to do for now but go back. Summersclose was over: winter had begun.

* * *

“Slow today, Saul.”

Hands still braced on his knees as he caught his breath, Saul glanced up. Detrich was just putting the sabre he’d been drilling with back on the weapon rack and was eyeing him with casual interest. He’d joined in on Saul’s exercises in the yard every day since the cast was taken off his leg, but this was the first day of weather dry enough for him to bring out the rack with all it held, swords, daggers, axes, and more exotic pieces that, in another time, Saul would have taken up with glee. He looked at Saul standing against that backdrop of splendid steel.

Saul looked away. “I’m thinking.”

“There’s a pleasant change.”

“It isn’t and you’re an ass.”

Detrich smirked, but said nothing.

He turned back to the rack and surveyed what was on offer. Saul saw his hands linger over the lower rungs, where some wooden practice swords were placed. Detrich crouched for a closer look, rubbed thoughtfully at his healed leg, looked over his shoulder. The look he gave Saul was one of deep assessment. And appreciation, Saul was sure.

He couldn’t take it any longer. He said, “Being exiled — can it be undone?”

Detrich gave a start. His look sharpened for a moment that made Saul’s windpipe tighten unpleasantly, before he rose back to his feet, raked a hand back through his hair in thought.

“It’s… complicated,” he said at last. Detrich had never denied him an answer yet, Saul thought. “Which is not to say impossible. There are several ways to separate a soul from the web. Exile of the sort that was done to you is the least of them — don’t give me that look,” he said to Saul’s bitter glare. “A Land’s Own can cut the connection between souls entirely. Tear out your roots and destroy them, and _that_ , no one survives.”

“No one?”

“If the shock doesn’t kill them, they die by their own hand. Invariably. But what Attoré’s done to you in Ilyiga was not a true severing. He hasn’t that power. There was a ritual done, wasn’t there? A sacerdote, everyone present gathered, some symbol destroyed?”

Saul’s right hand twitched, wanting to go to his left wrist. His nod was a twitch, too.

“There you have it. There’s no real power involved in such an act. It’s only in your mind, and the mind of the people who exile you from their community. The connection is still there, just blocked. Choked off.”

“And it could… open again? If Attoré…”

“Maybe. I can’t say. Souls and minds are not as straightforward as waterwheels. It couldn’t be done by Attoré’s hand alone, certainly, not while he isn’t Land’s Own.”

“And if he were?”

“That’s a very great _if_ , lad.”

Saul glared at him some more, but couldn’t dispute those words. He had followed Gabrello Attoré, obeyed him, fought for him; knew that he was no Festus Detrich.

He looked away again, thinking of the train, the slums, the mill. Thinking, _If Ilyiga had a Land’s Own, it would be a different country._

“Enough of that,” Detrich said abruptly, tearing him from those spiralling thoughts, and, when Saul turned back his way, handed him a practice sword.

The breath caught sharply in Saul’s chest. In an instant, everything else dropped away to the back of his mind. He took the length of wood, felt the weight of the metal core inside it, the balance like that of a real weapon. He met Detrich’s eyes, and his heart thrummed with a brilliant violence.

“Can we — ?”

The Land’s Own nodded. “You’re better, aren’t you?”

 _I am._ Strength sang in his arms, his chest. Not the strength he’d had before his exile, but that would come as he chased it back, _took_ it back. He gave the wooden sword a testing swing as Detrich switched his from hand to hand, shifted on his feet testing his balance. The practice blade was heavy enough, but the sight of the wood in his own hand irked him.

“This is a toy,” he scoffed. “You think I ever used training blades? Give me steel.”

“You’re out of practice and I’m off my form. No.”

“I want a real fight!”

“Maybe on the second round.”

Even fit to burst with eagerness, by now Saul knew better than to think Detrich movable. He took a stance, prepared to attack.

In half a heartbeat, Detrich was in his space, opening on a lightning push that leveraged his better reach. Saul wasn’t used to losing control of a first blow’s timing. He swung up and caught the thrust, swivelled aside, fended off a series of rattling strikes, fighting and failing to find a gap through which to slip. Detrich’s attacks were relentless and precise, timed on perfect footwork. Never overstretching, but never less than brutal. And he was _strong_. Saul twisted, ducked, weaved between blows, knew he was the faster fighter but couldn’t seem to put his speed to use. Before he knew it, he was being backed toward the building wall.

He’d not been ready. His heart pounded fit to burst; anger boiled under his wild excitement. _I’m a prodigy!_ he thought, and then he thought: _So is he._

At last Detrich’s advantage of that shocking first moment ran out. He never slowed — he was spending his energy with great precision, Saul noted — but knowing his opponent was cornered made him more cautious. He was looking for a desperate lashout to take advantage of. Any lesser swordsman would’ve given it, just under the intensity of his nearness. Saul reined his fury in and fought methodically. Built up to a rhythm. Cut and blocked and thrust and riposted. He knew the opening for a feint the moment Detrich gave it to him, and he went for it anyway. He lunged as Detrich swung, slipped to his knees as Detrich flipped the sword into his off-hand, thrust out — and then the point of his sword was under Detrich’s ribs, and Detrich’s sword was flat against his neck.

Saul’s breath hitched and shuddered. Every inch of him felt glowing. _I got him. He got me._ The words mixed in his mind. He couldn’t say what was more stunning.

“Hm,” Detrich said, panting, his eyes wide and wild. “Not bad.”

He dropped the point of his sword and, as Saul did the same, offered him a hand up.

Saul’s first instinct was to take that hand; but he checked it, instead, and looked up Detrich’s arm. Up at his face, the blue of his eyes that was and wasn’t like the sea. He thought, _It wouldn’t be easy, to kill him for Attoré._ Detrich was everything he’d claimed to be, back in Alsden. Where Saul had boasted that he needed no teaching from anyone. _I can outfight any man alive_ , he’d said _­_ — and Detrich had smiled. _Not me._

The steel on the rack glinted in the winter sun. _I want to fight him again._ Perhaps with live steel it would be different. Perhaps not. _I want, I want —_ fighting had been what he’d come for, why he’d agreed to follow Detrich to the Hyemi capitol. It was all there had been, at the time. Just hunger, and the promise of that fight, in the ghost of some unknown future where he was strong and well.

Then there had been the bread. The blood orange. The book. The river and the millpond. Now there was the war. _He will give me war_. And after — after —

Detrich frowned at him, puzzled at his unmoving stare. He put the sword carefully aside, and dropped down to sit next to Saul on the scant grass.

“Thinking again, lad?”

“Don’t call me that.”

Eyeing him, Detrich stretched his legs out before him, leaned forward to massage the calf of the healing one.

“We can go again.”

Saul hesitated. _Go again._ Until, until —

Then he said, “I met Stattenholme again, on Summersclose.”

Detrich’s shoulders tensed, but only briefly. His body was still fluid with the warmth of the fight’s exercise, sweat matting stray strands of his long hair as he swept them from his eyes. “You never did tell me what he wanted with you, that first time.”

“You never asked.”

“I’m not asking now.”

Saul turned a look at him, saw the truth of that. _He isn’t worried. About Stattenholme and me_ . The Duke’s words needled the back of his mind like a splinter under the skin: _I did not take you for a coward_.

He said, “He told me about Willie Arnbau.”

Detrich became very still, then pushed himself up, pulled his knees up and leaned his arms on them. Stared across the yard. All in silence.

Saul hadn’t expected silence. He tried to catch the Land’s Own’s gaze. “You said it was all true, what he told me about you. Is _this_ true?”

“It’s true.” Detrich returned his gaze, though within a moment memory hazed it. Saul narrowed his eyes, felt as though he were straining to look past that curtain — look _into_ Detrich, as Detrich so often seemed to look into him. “Willie was my brother-in-arms. Closer than most — another peasant-born officer, there weren’t many of us. I caught him trying to smuggle a nobleman’s mother and infant son across the border to Lansikaa. I let them go, and hanged him in their place.”

“You said, you can tolerate mercy —”

“But not treason. It’s true, yes.”

His gaze focused again on the here and now. Now he was watching Saul sit and weigh the story, the truth of it. Men were hanged, shot, or beaten to death in Ilyiga for defying their commanders often enough, for desertion, cowardice, or getting cocky and forgetting their place in the ranks. But this felt different. Arnbau had died, but two others had lived.

Detrich’s look was growing harder. Piercing, as if he were now the one to demand truthful answers. “What would you have done?”

He asked it as though it needed much thought. Saul shrugged. “Killed them all.”

“The woman? The child?”

“Weren’t they your enemies?”

“An old woman and a newborn are no one’s enemies.”

He spoke with finality, the kind his deep, arresting voice could lay down like no other. But Saul’s mind turned the words over once and dismissed them. _That’s how war is_.

Instead he said, “If what he did was right, why did you kill him?”

“It isn’t a question of right.” Detrich picked up the practice blade, put it in his lap. He ran his fingers across the wood as he spoke. “It’s a question of choice. He was my subordinate; the choice wasn’t his. I could have chosen to be merciful. But he was under orders. You want to be a soldier — do you understand?”

 _When I command, you obey_ . But it ran deeper than that. _Discipline. Patience. The bigger picture._ “And if he’d asked it of you — would you have let them go?”

Detrich hesitated. Strangely open, strangely banked.

“No,” he said, his eyes a distant dark again, and yet fixed on Saul’s face. “They _were_ my enemies. I was his commander — but the revolution was mine.”

“So the only way he could’ve saved them was this way. By making you kill him instead.”

He’d spoken simply, Saul knew, little in his tone but confusion. _Why would he do that?_ But he saw his words go through Detrich like a bullet. Saw his shoulders slump, his eyes widen with a look of sick horror, though Saul barely knew what it was in what he’d said that caused it. _For some old woman and her brat?_ Old women and little children died in war every day, starving like dogs on the street. They were in the way. That was what war was. _That was a worthy end?_

He had no answer, still, long moments later, when Detrich at last ran a heavy hand down his face, visibly collecting himself. Saul still didn’t know what he’d said that had hurt the Land’s Own so — had _hurt_ him, truly, as Saul had never imagined he’d be able to do. He didn’t want to do it again. _Who are you? What am I to you? What are you to me?_

“There you have it, then,” Detrich said. Tired, and calculating, and, somewhere under it all, very gentle. “Did Stattenholme say I’d one day turn on you, just as I turned on Arnbau?”

“He said…” _Detrich has use for you while he hopes for war; but after?_ And what came after the war — “That’s what Attoré did. I fought for him, and when he didn’t need me to fight anymore, he made me an exile. I was his general — his —”

“Were you, really?”

The words cut Saul’s breath off at the centre of his chest. Like a bullet. They should’ve made him feel furious. They just made him feel lost. _At worst I’m just a brute._

His voice cracked. “Arnbau — he betrayed you. I didn’t betray Attoré. I won’t —”

“Betray me? Haven’t you, lad?”

“Don’t call me that!” The dagger, the Land’s Own’s own weapon, against Detrich’s throat — but he’d been awake the whole time. He’d allowed it. He’d known. He’d known from the start.

“Attoré feared you,” Detrich said softly. “Your power. What you were. What you could become. I don’t.”

“What could I become?”

“A soldier.” He put the practice blade aside, between them on the bare earth. “A man.”

He sat in silence then. Saul’s hand reached out, hovered over the handle of the wooden sword. _Attoré was right to fear me_ , he’d told Detrich back in Alsden. It had been the last remaining tatters of the little general, with all else gone — his command, his glory, his steel. 

Now he looked at Detrich, and he thought: _Is that what you see, when you look at me? A man?_

He closed his hand on the wood. It was surprisingly warm.

Detrich looked back at him with his head slightly tilted. A seeking look, but not a cutting one. His own expression was open, as open as the vastly unknown feeling that still lay, now quietly stirring, inside Saul’s mind.

He said, “What is it you want, Fro Samaren?”

 _I want, I want —_ Ever since his arrival in Hyem he had wanted simple things. Food, sleep — freedom. The only want he had that was him, that was human, was wanting to go home. To Ilyiga. But Ilyiga was closed to him. _What can you be in peacetime?_

To want the sunlight, the sea, the sound of his own language… he could borrow time, but that hunger would finish him. Exiles died.

Alone _,_ exiles died. _I won’t die._ And so he had to live.

He drew himself up straight, looked the Land’s Own Guardian in the eye. “I want to help you, Domé Detrich.”

Detrich’s eyebrows sharply rose. He kept his eyes look on Saul for a long, long moment. At last, the corners of his mouth twitched; not a half-smile, one of those that ranged from wry to bitter, but a true one. Amused, but open. Welcoming.

“You want to help me — with the war?”

“With your enemies. I want to help you fight Stattenholme. The Kaiser. All the ones you’re fighting now.” Now that he’d said it, he was growing more certain with every word. Sitting up straighter made his chest feel as though it were expanding, full of more and clearer air the more he spoke. “Stattenholme told me I could come speak with him again. He thinks he can turn me against you.”

“Hm.” Detrich swept back his hair again. There was caution on his face, but not doubt. “I wouldn’t wager on you deceiving him. Even I can’t do that.”

“He won’t trust me. I know.”

“He’ll manage you carefully. But there are men around him who aren’t as careful.” Detrich’s expression twisted suddenly. “I’d give my good right arm to know how he knew about the shooting before my return to the capitol. That’s what started this whole damned mess.”

Saul nodded, then blinked. “ _I’d_ like to know how he knew about Attoré and me.”

“There’s a question. I wonder if the two things are related.”

“If he asks me about your plans —”

“Just answer his questions.”

“Honestly?”

Detrich’s smile turned bitter again. “I know where Duke Stattenholme, Speaker of the Upper House, has me outdone.”

Saul couldn’t say this answer pleased him much, but he saw no point in arguing, either. He gave another nod, quick and sharp, but firm.

“I’m your soldier,” he said simply. And after a moment, “Your man.”

A brilliance gleamed across Detrich’s eyes at that, for a moment like sunlight on the sea; then abruptly he turned his gaze to the gate, and a moment later Saul heard frantic hoofbeats approaching. He scrambled to rise in Detrich’s wake. As the Land’s Own swung the gate open, on its other side, Major Basholme’s eldest son nearly tumbled off his horse, all in breathless disarray.

“Fro Detrich!” he gasped out. “Father sent me. He’s just had word. Duke Stattenholme’s gone and invited an Adalan diplomat to court!”

“ _What?!”_ Every bit of ease boiled away from Detrich all at once. He grabbed for the paper that Basholme’s son held out to him, and his eyes roved wildly over the scribbled text. “And I wasn’t — damned Freider, he _let_ him? Without a vote — this isn’t lawful!”

“He’s to come as the Duke’s personal guest,” Basholme’s son filled in. He hung back outside the gate, as nervous as his shying horse before the Land’s Own’s wrath. “Father says you mustn’t come to Parliament. The Prime Minister is with the Kaiser now. He says if you protest in person it’ll start to look like a personal grudge —”

“Personal — I’m the _Land’s Own Guardian!”_ His voice teetered on the edge of a roar. Detrich turned savagely round, shoved the paper at Saul, and stalked back across the yard to pick up his practice blade. He snapped it once against his good leg with an audible crack, snarling. “Damn the lot of them. Damn them all. Tell your damned father to let the Prime Minister know, I’ll want to hear everything. _Everything_. And Stattenholme — Sun hear me, one day I’ll have it of him. One day I’ll take all his hopes —”

He stopped, dragged in a rasping breath, and turned his burning gaze on Saul. “What are you waiting for? Get your sword. We’re going again. And don’t mistake it, lad — by springtime, I _will_ have my war.”

END ACT I


	10. How Any War Starts

_Ander, my heart’s own,_

_I trust this letter reaches you sealed. Otherwise, you know what to do with the messenger. I will not tolerate another breach of confidence in this matter, especially when we have yet to locate the first._

_You’ll have heard the news, but I wish you to have it from my own hand: the Kaiser has permitted Stattenholme to invite Lord Gerfroy Cullough, lately Her Majesty’s Emissary to Lansikaa, to the capitol. Formally he comes as a private person. I don’t know yet what cause will be found for him to speak to Parliament. Meanwhile, there’s to be a ball. I’ll miss you there more than I can say; perhaps I’ll take the brat along instead, just so someone in attendance is even more uncomfortable than I am._

_Things are otherwise at a stalemate. Well enough. The inquiry board waits on some report trying to track down the Adalan gun. Wasted effort. The Kaiser’s gone into seclusion for his nerves and I can only hope he spends it tearing out whatever hair the revolution left him with. The first winter storm saw two dams burst at opposite ends of the country. Exhausting, but keeps one busy. And my leg is fine and I will have it on your honour that you disregard whatever it is Hedi is writing you about it._

_I hear Kleiner and others in the party have written you as well; I assume it was more of the usual squirming about tempering my interventions. I hate that I must be angry at the man. He’s done everything the Prime Minister position has afforded him since this morass begun. But I damn well wish he’d do more. Does he think everyone in the Upper House acts with good faith and clean hands? The lot of them are still so in awe of being allowed a fraction of power, they’re afraid to demand even a fraction more. I don’t know how to explain to them that laying down our guns does not mean the fight is over. We can’t have the war soon enough. We need soldiers, fighting men! Women, too, time and effort willing — men and women who know how to bleed for a cause, and bleed others for it too if need be! Nationalize industry and wealth, build the steel mills and the railroads, take the Essine trade — train up a hundred thousand peasant-born officers and let them move up in the world — none of it would truly change Hyem until every youth, of every station, has fought alongside their brothers and sisters for the future of this land. However much is lost to us in the process._

_But you’ve heard this from me a thousand times. Forgive me — Gus isn’t completely wrong to question my patience. I’m going mad by inches. I can endure everything about this except your absence from my side. Gus does what he can but is every bit as frustrated. I’m loath to drag Hedi into any of this, never mind any of my Guardians. I find myself speaking to the brat perhaps more than is good for either of us. He wants this war — not as a necessary evil, but as an end in itself. But he listens to me. When I say we must fight, he understands._

_I’ve distracted us both from our duties long enough. I fear I’ve no news yet about your return to the capitol, but having my most trusted man is at the border has its merits. Hold fast in the meantime. Keep warm. Should your soul reach to me I will always know it._

_—_ _F.D._

_PS: We should ride to the reservoir at Wilseburn this spring, soon as we can find a time. I’ve learned something new — you’ll never guess how._

  
  


* * *

His Hyemi-cut clothing was thick and stiff about the shoulders, but nonetheless, Saul straightened his spine and squared his shoulders and drew himself up as tall as he could.

“I’m here to see Stattenholme.”

Of all the men he’d met in Hyem, few could claim to have effectively glared at him, but Stattenholme’s man Vestgaard gave it a concentrated try. Up so close, flanked by the black wrought-iron gates of his master’s house, the guard looked half iron himself in the black livery not quite gracing his tall, bony form. His hair and beard were gray, his eyes as gray as the early-winter sunlight, but his brows were still an icy blond. For some Hyemi noble’s guard dog, he looked worth trading a few blows with.

Saul didn’t linger on that. He was here to take Stattenholme up on his offer of conspiracy. It seemed sensible to show he could be subtle about it. 

“His Grace,” Vestgaard corrected, in a drawl that implied more scorn than offense taken. Something about his accent niggled at Saul to place it. His looks, too, were somehow familiar. “His Grace doesn’t see brats without appointments.”

“He said I would know where to find him.”

Vestgaard turned his head and made a thick noise as though meaning to spit. “Manners like pigs in the wood, all you Ilyigans,” he grunted. “Tezzei, eh? Who dredged you up and sent you into the field, the Clean Flame militia?”

“You know about —” It came in a flash. “Lansikaan. You’re a Lansikaan mercenary.” They were rare and remarkable, men who had come to fight in the civil war for fighting’s sake. They brought wonderful weapons, and walked among the other soldiers as though they were two heads taller at least. A mercenary didn’t really care who won a war, as long as it was someone who’d pay an able eye and hand at a gun; they had nothing to lose but their lives. A Lansikaan mercenary had no business among the lovingly trimmed firs framing Duke Emen Stattenholme’s gates. “Who’d you fight for?”

“Easterner armies. All sorts.” Vestgaard made a dull sound in his throat again. “Got boring.”

He turned around before Saul could ask how much more exciting he was finding the Duke’s service, and waved for Saul to follow. They came in through the front door this time, into a large and airy reception room with curving staircases to either side — smaller than in Freiherren Geitenholme’s home, nor as lavish, but neater somehow, reserved and precise. Drapes of light-blue velvet shimmered sky-like with silver thread, and in every corner, fresh white flowers matched the white of their tall and thin porcelain vases, as though the house had never heard of winter. 

Vestgaard didn’t pause to let Saul look as he pleased, but led him up the steps at a brisk clip. At the top they found a closed door and a maidservant who looked them over with pinched-lipped displeasure. Vestgaard’s looming presence made the woman waver; she opened the door only to vanish behind and leave it shut again.

A moment later, Duchess Anké Stattenholme emerged.

Vestgaard blinked a little to see her. The Duchess blinked at him in turn. She was wearing blue again, Saul saw, the same shade as the velvet of the curtains, and looked just a touch harried. “Oh, young Fro Saul. Good morning.” She gave a little curtsy, to which Vestgaard returned a sharp salute. “You may leave him to me, Joost.” 

“Mij damme?” Vestgaard’s tone was sharper yet. The Duchess shook her head.

“Quite all right — it’s quite all right.” Her eyes were on Saul now, who felt oddly unnerved under them. He had a crisp recollection of her voice telling him to wash his face. She had talked about soul-hunger… “Come, fro, take tea with me. Light fare, you need not worry on that account.” 

“I —” Saul began, but she was already moving.

She walked with as much purpose as Vestgaard, leaving him with no recourse but to fall into step behind her. Her feet made no sound on the carpeted floor. Portraits lined the walls, grave Stattenholmes past. “You must forgive us,” the Duchess said as she opened the door to a small drawing room flooded with light. “My husband is briefly indisposed. A headache. I hope you have not come to exacerbate it.” This with a flash of a smile over her shoulder at him — not a soft smile, from such a soft face.

“I came to talk to him about Detrich.”

“Yes; what else do men in this country talk about?” Melancholy touched the smile then, though it was hard to read her face with the light at her back. She stood haloed in the cool winter sunshine, a shimmer of silver to her dark hair. 

For a moment he stared at that light, faintly baffled, faintly suspicious. Fiercely curious. Until the Duchess prompted, “Does Fro Detrich know that you are here?”

“He’s working in the web.” Had been for days, spending all his time in the courtyard sitting with his bare hands to the bare earth. Sending his power a thousand miles away to town after town in the path of the flood from a burst dam. When not in that deep trance, he was too wrung out to do much more than eat a sparse meal and then collapse into fits of restless sleep. Saul wasn’t sure Detrich knew his own name just now, much less where his ward had gone. “He said that as long as I keep his rules I can do what I wish.”

“And your wish was to come here?” She raised an eyebrow at him, then turned toward the room’s large window. It opened into a balcony, where she stood to look out and away. “The city is very beautiful,” she said, “and you have the freedom of it.

Saul could’ve shrugged; but instead, a little haltingly, he said, “The big market’s too much for me. All that food. But I like it there.”

The Duchess made a soft thoughtful sound. He came out to join her on the balcony, finding himself looking out across larger grounds than he had realized the house had. All brown and grayish-green in the Hyemi winter, and bordered by the wall and the firs like the edge of a world. 

“I hear the Kaiserplatz market was the first to open again after the revolution,” the Duchess said, turning from the view to look at him. “Was there such a market in Tezzei?”

The question caught Saul utterly off his guard. Of course there were markets in Tezzei; like all of the city, they bubbled to the surface of his memory at the lightest touch. But no one ever spoke of the markets when speaking of Ilyiga. “The Grand Temple had one, in the Piazza di Sole.”

“As large as the Kaiserplatz market?”

“Larger, before the war. It only opens once a month now.” Her eyes lingered on his face. He added, “It did when I left, anyway. It might be different now.”

She nodded. “In Lansikaa, the Koningspoort market opened once a month to sell its luxuries. My classmates and I would go and find the most marvellous things. Music boxes, scientific instruments, beautiful ancient books…” 

“Was there food?”

“Oh, yes — not the everyday sort, of course. Exotic spices, liquors and cheeses… and stroopwafel stalls, but those are everywhere in Lansikaa. On fine days, when the streets were crowded, the whole city smelled of it. Like a cloud of spun sugar in the air…”

Saul tried to picture it. His mouth watered. “In Tezzei they’d sell awamat. Fried dough with honey. They’re so sweet, even grown men couldn’t manage more than a handful.”

“I have heard this about Ilyiga. The sweetest sweets, and the bitterest coffee.”

“Do you Hyemi drink coffee?”

“Bad coffee. The fashion here is to drink it unsweetened, but weak. Ugh! In Lansikaa it’s drunk with cream — a great deal of cream, so that the flavour becomes smooth. We — they are very fond of it in the salons of Lansikaa. All intellectual conversation is done over coffee.”

“Are you from Lansikaa?” he asked — quite abruptly, apparently, because she gave the tiniest start. 

“No, no.” The Duchess shook her head. “I was born here, up north near Alsblich. In my husband’s own province.” And then, quickly: “Is this what you miss most about Ilyiga? The food?”

Another question that made Saul hesitate, unprepared. A hundred things leapt to the forefront of his mind at once. _Is she trying to make me think of home?_ Perhaps she was doing it as part of her husband’s plan, reminding him what he stood to regain. She hardly needed to. It was like prodding an already broken limb.

But she looked at him with that same almost-hunger as she had on that first day in the coach, eerie and buried deep in her eyes. He remembered the sound of her voice, however halting and accented, speaking his own language. 

He said, “I miss the sea.”

Anké Stattenholme’s mouth worked very faintly, tension at its edges. She looked across the gardens. “So do I.”

Some twenty minutes later, when the door opened to admit a scowling Vestgaard and a smiling physician in his wake, they were still trading memories: the Inner Sea of Tezzei, green and warm, purring like a great cat along a golden beach; and the Lansikaan North Sea, all peaks of blue-gray under an iron sky, smelling of a savage freedom. Vestgaard had to clear his throat to stop the Duchess in mid-tale: she was describing to Saul the Lansikaan clippers, quick and cunning and ruthless as seagulls, that braved the Northeast Passage’s jaws of black ice to bring furs, tree-sugar, and amber from Betairun. Saul almost snapped at him — he could have done her one better, he thought, with the few tales he had of his own father’s journeys back to old Samar — but the Duchess leaped to her feet at once. 

She turned and curtsied to the physician, then looked a bit mortified to have done so, though not as much as the woman herself in the face of the gesture. “Ah — how is it, Arztin?”

The physician’s throat worked visibly, swallowing the awkwardness down. “Mm — yes — Your Grace, I am pleased to say your husband’s condition is entirely a passing one — strained nerves, as was his own assessment — nothing that many a good wife has not cured by her own tender hand.” At this the Duchess smiled, relaxing, and the physician continued with some relief, “I have some instructions for your staff, if you will permit…”

The Duchess quickly nodded, and glanced back to Saul before Vestgaard grunted, “His Grace’ll see the boy now.”

“Oh — of course.” Another nod. Saul tried to read her look, but Anké Stattenholme was more skilled at shuttering her face than her husband or even Detrich. In one breath, she was already another person. That nod was his permission to depart her presence, and a clear-cut message that he was no longer welcome to consider himself her concern. 

He didn’t mind her disregard, precisely. His heart was already picking up its pace in preparation to finally see the Duke. But she gave him one last look before Vestgaard ushered him out, and said, “Come speak with me again, Fro Saul. This past hour has meant much to me.”

No more than that — and she shut the door behind him. He hurried after Vestgaard, once again leaving her presence understanding that much less than he had coming into it.

But it did mean that he felt more grounded in the Duke’s presence. Here, he knew what he wanted and what was wanted from him. Emen Stattenholme was sitting up in a large bed in the room that Vestgaard led him into, covered up to his chest and dressed in a loose shirt, his face pinched and pale. A valet stood at his side, leaning down to wipe a damp cloth across his brow. It was a disarming sight.

Saul was not disarmed. The Duke’s gray eyes were as sharp as chipped flint. “Young general,” he said, dismissing his man with a flick of his hand. “You will pardon my appearance. Your patron has a way of bringing his betters low.”

Don’t wager on deceiving him, Detrich had warned — _and don’t get cocky_ , though Saul had taken that warning rather less to heart. He had considered his approach at length in the days since offering Detrich his help. It was a fresh challenge, but after wrestling the hopeless, spiralling riddle of his exile for so long, he relished both challenge and freshness. _How does a war start?_ Now, he thought, he would learn.

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” he told the Duke — which was the truth, however technical. “I’ve come to… know more, before I decide what to do.”

“About Detrich?”

“About what you’d told me. About —” Some flicker in the Duke’s face made him rethink the end of his sentence before it could come out. Instead he said, “About other countries being spooked by the revolution.”

Another, almost imperceptible shade of expression, fleeting in Stattenholme’s eye. Saul made no movement, but knew. _I passed a test_. He knew better than to think the definite article.

The Duke tugged idly on a frill of his blanket. “He does not know you have come here?”

“He knows nothing except his work right now, I think.”

“Deep in the web…” Stattenholme mused. “Well enough. Well enough…” The gray arrow of his gaze leapt back up and at Saul’s eyes. “What changed your mind?” 

“I asked him. What you told me to.” And it was almost the truth.

“And did his response bring some clarity?”

There was almost a mockery there, along with that needle focus. Saul flung his head back, his chin up. “I don’t want to be used again.”

A faint smirk turned the Duke’s noble mouth. A knowing one. “And so you come to me?”

It was almost too much, that smirk, from a pale man in his bed who could not fight. Saul’s temper crackled under his skin. He decided to let it. _Just a brute_ — yes, that would suit Stattenholme well. 

“I don’t care what you want from me,” he said flatly. “I care about being free from him. He’s a soldier and a Guardian — he can chase me down and outfight me. What can _you_ do?”

Stattenholme raised both eyebrows at him, climbing high on his noble forehead; then gave a single, clear-glass note of laughter.

“A soldier. Indeed,” he said with a deep nod; then winced at the gesture, pushing two fingers to the orbit of one eye. “You find me at an ill-suited time, young general, and under ill-suited circumstances. I shall arrange for a more convenient setting for our conversation. After the ball, perhaps.” With his other hand he gestured to Vestgaard, who had all this time been standing at attention by the closed door, as immutably silent as the marble of the house’s walls. “Joost will see you out. But you are welcome to visit, as your patron’s preoccupation allows it. In fact…”

Saul leaned slightly in, but could not rightly read Stattenholme’s expression until the Duke began again more softly, “In fact, you may come speak with my Anké now and then. She is… broad-minded, as women go. Lansikaan ideas. Harmless, essentially, but very queer…” Briefly he stared into space, lips pursed. 

If this was meant to keep him off-balance, Saul thought, then the Duke was very good. “You want me to come entertain your wife?”

“Under proper supervision, of course.” Humour coloured the Duke’s voice again. “She tells me she had never met an Ilyigan before you.”

“She speaks some Ilyigan.”

“She is splendidly educated — as women go. I do not yet quite know my opinion of that practice. But she is my wife, and will be the mother of my sons, and a husband has no higher duty but to provide. And so I appeal to your kindness.”

Now that had to be mockery, but Saul found himself at a loss as to what could be lurking beneath the Duke’s words. Much as he was at a loss to understand the Duchess, maybe. Maybe Stattenholme, too, was out of his depths there. _Women_ , Saul thought, remembering how the older men would say the word — with the fumbling confusion of anger and awe and derision and desire. He understood none of that but the confusion, himself, but it seemed to him that that was the crucial part.

He shrugged. The Duke didn’t need to know that he was blisteringly curious. “I’ll come.”

“Thank you.” In that, of all things, Stattenholme sounded eerily sincere, though perhaps it was his headache. He leaned back and shut his eyes as Saul turned around, putting himself back under Vestgaard’s supervision as ungrudgingly as he could.

They headed back to the front door through yet another corridor — the house was at least four times the size of Detrich’s home, Saul found himself noting with vague irritation. It had not nearly enough residents to fill the space. The staff may as well have been ghosts. The only bit of life he heard or saw was when they passed a small room by the entrance where a pair of guards sat, chatting over a game of cards. Saul knew the game and knew the talk. Fighting men’s games and talk — all the same.

“So I stick my boot up his nose, and I say, fro, you may think Mother Sun shines out of every arse in the People’s Army — Joost, spare a comrade five kroner,” a lanky fellow called out as they passed the door, tilting back his chair with his feet braced precariously on the table. “Ostmann is winning everything but my balls here, and I’m running out of stories to distract him — hey, is that Detrich’s Ilyigan pup?”

Before Vestgaard could quite stop him Saul was leaning into the room, looking over the player’s shoulder. “You should fold or he’ll get your balls, too.”

The player swore loudly, and across the table Ostmann gave a snort. He glared at Vestgaard when the Lansikaan came in. “Your money’s mine anyway, you northern bugger. You still owe me from last week’s shooting match.”

“You cheated,” Vestgaard ground out.

“Hah! You just can’t admit your fancy Lansikaan gun does the real work for you!” 

“You do always cheat,” the other player complained. He glanced up at Saul. “Is he cheating right now?”

Saul couldn’t be less interested in that. Ostmann’s comment had shot his curiosity sky-high. “What kind of guns does he have?”

“Oh, Lansikaans know weapons like they know each other’s back ends,” Ostmann said cheerfully as though Vestgaard were not standing three feet from him looking like a kettle about to whistle. “They sell them all over the continent — to those who can pay, of course. Made a fortune in Adalas in the last war, didn’t you, Joost? You blood-trading bastards and your breech-loaders. We should be gutting you in the street.”

Vestgaard’s smirk was full of teeth. “You try.”

“I will if I don’t get my money. A gun that shoots five hundred yards won’t do you much good when I’m a knife’s length away.”

Something in the back of Saul’s mind stirred at _five hundred yards_ , a slippery thread he couldn’t quite grab — and then, to the surprise of all three men, the Duchess's maidservant appeared at the door. She had a carefully wrapped bundle and a look of vaguely disturbed fascination.

“Young fro, I was worried you had gone.” Without warning, she stepped forward and handed the bundle to Saul. “Her Grace wishes you to have this.” 

“Her Grace?” Vestgaard sounded very much unlike himself when shocked. The two guards perked up in their seats, nudging at Saul to look over his shoulder as he took the bundle. He bared his teeth at the both of them, but their retreat was barely more than token as he unrolled one layer of fabric to reveal another.

It was a full outfit, complete with shoes — the shoes were what caught Saul’s attention first, so different from his heavy winter boots. The leather was tender, creamy, formed to a point at the toes, a shining silver buckle on the front and the whole shoe reaching barely to the ankle. He couldn’t imagine walking anywhere in such fine and flimsy things. The trousers were a deeper deerskin brown, a row of buttons — silver again — on their cuffs; the white undershirt had frills at its neck and sleeves, delicate lace like seafoam. A buttoned vest followed, and a jacket with long coattails and a high, stiff collar, and to Saul’s utter astonishment both were a heady scarlet, heavily decorated with thread he was sure had some gold in it. He had never seen so much colour in a Hyemi outfit. He ran his hand across the stitching and felt its wondrous weight.

“Her Grace sends her apologies for not being sure of the fit.” The maidservant spoke as if reciting the message verbatim. “This was worn by her brother when he was the young fro’s age. But there is a little time to have it adjusted before the ball.” 

“The _ball_?” Vestgaard choked out.

” _Adjusted_ ?” Saul blurted out at the same time. He pictured telling Detrich as much. _He’ll go off like a carronade_.

The woman’s nod showed all the weariness in the world. “Her Grace desires the young fro to not feel embarrassed in Hyemi company.”

Nobody having the faintest idea of how to otherwise react, Saul went back to the Land’s Own’s house carrying a suit likely the cost of at least half the house itself. Mia’s mouth dropped open when he showed her and nothing very clever came out, and even Alamann was roused from his serenity to grab the nearest chair and carefully ease himself into it, blinking and blinking. Both of them were lurking at the bottom of the steps, peering up like a pair of cats around a hedge, when Saul knocked on the door to Detrich’s bedroom.

He had to knock three times, hard, before the muffled sounds of movement came from inside, punctuated by a dry cough, and the Land’s Own stuck a sleep-mussed head out. The shadows under his eyes were half-healed wounds. “Your timing,” he grunted, needing to add very little to that.

“I went to see Stattenholme.” Nothing he might say would improve Detrich’s mood, so may as well say nothing unnecessary. “I think he believed me, about wanting to hear him out some more. He said we should meet after the ball.”

Detrich’s eyes sharpened visibly, like the touch of flint to stone, at the Duke’s name. He raked his hair back from its mess of floating strands. “Did he ask any questions?”

“He wanted to know what changed my mind. I told him I didn’t want to be used.” He wasn’t quite surprised when Detrich gave one hard bark of laughter, not so different from Stattenholme himself. “I think he believed that, too. Did you know he has a Lansikaan mercenary working for him?”

“Joost Vestgaard, yes. He really works for the Duchess. The Iselholmes like fostering their children with Lansikaan nobility — what’s this?”

As he came out of the room, Saul wordlessly unfolded the bundle to show its contents. Detrich took in the shoes with surprise, the trousers and undershirt with dismay, and the coat with open horror. “What in _hell_ —”

His response might have been amusing had Saul not been equally baffled. “The Duchess gave it to me.”

“The _Duchess_?” Detrich’s voice caught on an undignified crack. “What did you do?”

“We talked for a while —”

“You _talked_?”

“What did you think I did?!”

Detrich stared at him for a while, then shook his head hard. “Never mind. You’re growing up well, lad, but not well enough yet to earn _that_.” He shifted with deceptive dexterity to avoid Saul’s angry kick at his shins. His voice hardened again. “Stop that nonsense. And get rid of this thing. I won’t have it in my house.”

“I could wear it to the ball.”

“Why on earth would I take you to the ball?”

“To upset everyone else there.” Now there was a response Detrich couldn’t dismiss. Saul nodded at the gold embroidery. “I think that might be why she gave it to me. To make you angry.”

“I _am_ angry!” Detrich blew out a long, hissing breath, thick with indecision. He pushed a hand back through his hair again, catching his fingers on a snarl. “I can’t spend all my time there making sure you don’t say something stupid to someone stupid. And this costs more than Mia’s yearly pay.” He reached out his other hand with stilted hesitation, hovering just over the gleaming scarlet. There was an echo in his face of that raw look he had given the blood orange at the market, the lines of Saul’s calligraphy. Then he pulled the hand away to give a violent rub to both eyes. 

By now Saul knew a strategic opening when he saw one. “I can make myself Stattenholme’s problem, at the ball. Wearing his wife’s gift. He might think he’s making progress with me.”

Detrich made a doubtful sound, but then let his hand drop to his side in visible resignation. What rest he had been able to get himself before Saul had knocked on his door had clearly as good as never happened. He began redoing the buttons on his jacket. “You’ll be better dressed than I will,” he muttered, then seemed to perk up at that. “At least no one will think it was me who paid for this.” Businesslike again, after the manner of a man eager to put some unpleasantness behind him, he moved past Saul and down the stairs toward his office. Though he kept muttering all the while.

Saul came down after another moment, torn clean halfway between excitement and apprehension. He had very little idea of what a ball actually was. At the bottom of the staircase, Mia appeared, and tugged a sleeve free from the bundle before he could pull it out of her reach.

“This would be too long for you,” she opined. “Oh, Sun’s mercy, it’s fine! After the ball, I’ll ask Fro Detrich to let me take some of the gold thread for my wedding dress.”

“It isn’t yours.”

“It isn’t yours, either.” She gave a little yelp as he yanked the sleeve from her hands. Then her voice softened, “You really cannot go anywhere with the sleeves all hanging past your hands. I can get it fixed up nice for you.”

Saul eyed her. Mia was never nice without reason. “In return for what?”

“I’ve a friend who has a problem that needs scaring off. She wished for me to ask Fro Detrich, but he deals with enough already.” She darted a glance down the hall, brief and knotted with worry. “It won’t take you five minutes, and her mother is a very good seamstress.”

“Would it be breaking any rules?”

“Can you scare someone off without a weapon?”

Saul grinned.

“Sun’s sake,” Mia muttered, looking at him sidelong. “You’ll do fine. Here, let me take this. The sooner it’s out of the house and out of his sight, the better for all of us… and don’t tell him about our deal, either. Even the greatest man alive has to learn that some problems aren’t his to solve.”


	11. The Dance

Mia did not call in her favour in the three days leading up to the ball, but she reminded Saul of it in no uncertain terms before presenting the finished suit to him that evening. Then she told him to give his word again or she’d leave him to get dressed on his own. He gave that threat all the attention it seemed to merit for a handful of minutes, before realization sank in somewhere around his third attempt to straighten out the frills on the shirt’s collar.

He swung the door to his room open hard enough to make the handle crash into the wall. Mia was already waiting outside, arms crossed behind her back. At the sight of him her shoulders started to shake and she bit her lip as it curled upward. The evening was not off to the start he’d expected.

“It’s all right,” she told him as she buttoned up the cuffs. Her voice was choked with glee. “You should see Fro Detrich try to — no, I said nothing.”

“Just make it fit!”

“If you’d stop squirming like a bucketful of eels, I might — there. Now, the collar…” With a look of intense focus and a series of tugs, she finally tamed the frills, then reached out and swept his bangs back with a hand so sure and decisive he had no chance to protest. “No, you can’t go out like this. Get me my scissors.”

“No. Enough.”

“You can’t have a suit like a young duke and hair like a wildcat.”

“No!” He ducked under her hand as she reached for him again, slipped around her, grabbed the door handle as he exited, and slammed it in her face. Then he thumped down the stairs two at time and nearly fell on his face at the bottom when one of his fine soft shoes slipped.

Mia didn’t chase him into Detrich’s office, but the Land’s Own did look up in unimpressed surprise as he slipped in — only for that look to go through an unnerving flurry of expressions at Saul in the Duchess’s suit. Saul couldn’t be sure what any of them meant, except that they ended with the deliberate assumption of a look of careful neutrality.

"You’re looking — hm. Better than presentable." Detrich looked down at his own outfit — dress uniform, Saul guessed, a faintly shimmering gray instead of his usual black, and a sash across the chest bearing a handful of medals.

“I’m not letting Mia cut my hair.”

“What?” With a faint shake of his head, Detrich waved Saul toward the desk, where some red leather ribbons lay in a tangle. "Speaking of which, give me a hand here. It looks better when I don't try to tie it off myself."

He sat down again at the desk as Saul took up a ribbon and turned to show his long plait still unfastened. Saul gathered up the plait in one hand. Detrich’s hair was finer than his own, but long enough to have a weight to it, and smooth as silk. "It's a hassle. Why do you keep it so long?"

"It suits me." And it did; Saul thought of the painted steppe warriors in the book again. If Detrich were pale rather than brown, he'd fit in that picture perfectly. "And it's unfashionable."

"Is that good?"

Detrich snorted. "Stattenholme says that I have no sense for fashion. You know what a sense of fashion takes? Money. Time. Idle mind, idle hands." He gestured down his uniform. "This is who I am."

But after a moment, he added: "But you look good, lad."

Saul was still preening, however slightly, an hour later when they came to the palace steps; but the sight of those steps, and what stood at the top of them, lay swift claim to his attention. By now he was used to seeing in Hyem so much wealth and splendour that the war had long ago stripped from Ilyiga. And still the façade with its rows of doors and windows — like a great creature sprawled, shoving aside the city to claim its space — the marble columns of the entrance and the engraved slab with its crest at their centre crowning them, the gilded dome, the rearing stone horses, the flowers out of season heaped thick in every window: all of it left him half-hypnotized. His neck ached from turning his head in every direction.

It took him a while to recognize that he was alone in this; Detrich’s stony gaze was fixed straight ahead, and his path similarly arrow-straight through the small crowd of richly dressed folk about the entrance. The Land’s Own moved for no one and everyone moved for him. His hands were open at his sides when Saul glanced at them, but his fingers held every bit of the tension of the fists he was fighting not to make.

Anger, of course. Always anger. But not only that.

He had still not placed what other emotion it might have been when the footman leading them pushed the doors to the ballroom open and called out across it: “In attendance: the Land’s Own Guardian, Fro Festus Detrich, and Fro Saul Samaren of Ilyiga.”

From outside, the palace had been fascinating; this room was dazzling. Massive, three times as large as the grand ballroom in the husk of a mansion that had once housed Saul’s entire unit for weeks. Brilliant with hanging hoops of crystal and light. Golden drapes and mirrors along the walls caught the light and returned it as though breathing it out to inflate the space, and every dress and suit in the room soaked that light in and bloomed in a hundred colours. There was music, an orchestra of two dozen. There were servants about with trays of treats and sweets, with bottles of dark wine. Saul remembered lying on the cold stone of the mansion floor, cushioned with ash, staring up at the painted ceiling and imagining how the paintings may have looked before looters had scraped out the gold paint. Thinking, _What kind of life was it, to have a home like this?_

It had seemed as far and as alien as the stars that had sprinkled their light in through the cracked roof. Now it was there in front of his eyes. He took a spellbound step forward, only to realize — surprised at his own surprise — that Detrich had closed a vice grip about his upper arm.

“You’ll be forgiven much, as an ignorant young foreigner,” the Land’s Own said, low and tight in his ear. “For the most part, they find creatures like you amusing. But don’t lose your temper and don’t give deliberate insult. Don’t push your luck, or it’s worth your life. Do you understand, boy?” He let out a long breath through clenched teeth. “You asked about power. This is power. And to this power, you’re more mud than man.”

He let go then, straightening as Saul rubbed his arm. The eyes of the room were all upon them as men bowed and women curtsied. Curiosity and expectation, and both of them cold.

In a moment the crowd was shifting to let through a small group, three men flanking a delicate bird of a woman almost drowned in her massive, pearl-studded dress. Detrich gave her a jerk of a salute.

“Your Majesty.”

“Land’s Own Guardian.” The Kaiserin’s voice was a touch raspy, a touch too high. “It pleases us to see you well.”

“No doubt. Are you here in His Majesty’s place?”

“He shall grace us with his presence a little later. His physicians have ordered him to keep to his bed as much as possible.”

“No doubt,” Detrich said again, dryly. “It’s important to stay warm and rested in winter. The poor of the country starving in the fields will certainly say so.”

One of the men around the Kaiserin coughed lightly. The woman herself had a look of brittle pain. “Please, Fro Detrich. Not tonight.”

“Oh? Are they not starving tonight?”

“Fro Detrich,” the man who had coughed broke in. “If I may. I wish to introduce our guest of honour. If Her Majesty will give us leave…”

The Kaiserin nodded at once. She leaned on one of her companions’ arm as they turned to leave the small group. As they walked away Saul could see him lean down to let her whisper to him, thought he heard the word _Ilyigan_ low under the swell of music. But he stayed in place, wanting much more to see Detrich meet the envoy from Adalas.

The man making the introductions gestured Lord Gerfroy Cullough forward, gave his name and titles — a small handful of the latter. Cullough was a handsome sort, round-faced and rosy, very different from the Hyemi nobles around him with their sharp cheekbones and cool gray eyes. His smile spoke nothing but cordiality for the whole world about him, and his bow was vigorous and sincere.

“Messer Detrich, a pleasure.”

“Fro Cullough.”

If Cullough had any opinion on the title Detrich had chosen, he did not show it. “I bring regards from Her Majesty the Queen, and from Madame D’Ubald.” This was the Land’s Own Guardian of Adalas, Saul remembered. The ambassador slipped a small, exquisitely jewelled tobacco box from an inner coat pocket, and tipped its lid open. “From the Queen’s own hand, her own Madravashi mix. You partake, I hope?”

He held it up, only for Detrich to make a face and whip aside with a sneeze. Cullough’s smile faltered a touch. “Mm, I’ll take that as a no.”

Saul saw the man who had made the introductions stiffen. His own jaw, he found, was faintly tight. He didn’t know whether Cullough knew of Detrich’s disgust with luxury and was mocking it, or if perhaps the ambassador had not bothered to find out a detail so essential to the Land’s Own’s character, but he knew there was an insult in either option.

Detrich ran the back of a hand over his nose and mouth, but was otherwise very still. He was taller than Cullough, just enough for it to be immediately obvious. Though Saul felt nothing himself, he quickly noticed: all around them, men and women were giving little shudders, pulling loose clothes tighter about them wherever they could. “Fro Cullough, you seem under the impression that you’re paying a diplomatic visit.”

Cullough gave a little laugh. “Not hardly, I am aware. But what does it hurt to be gracious? Our countries are neighbours.”

“Our countries are enemies.”

“You linger on the past, Messer Detrich. Duke Stattenholme told me that you were a stiff-necked sort —”

“He should have told you I was a baseborn savage. I won’t dance this dance with you. We both know what you’re here for.” And this time Saul did feel it, and knew that Detrich willed it so: the jolt through the very foundation of the house, through the Hyemi soil and bedrock. “You are not welcome on my land.” 

Much of the warm colour had drained from Cullough’s face. Whether he was a fool or not, Saul was yet undecided, but he was willing to grant that the man was brave. He watched him take a measured step back, and then another, keeping his eyes on Detrich all the while.

The jolt had disrupted the orchestra’s rhythm. They were now flailing faintly, trying to catch up with each other again. The ballroom thrummed with low conversations almost drowning them out. It was another thick moment — Detrich coldly fuming, Cullough in slow retreat, the introducer clearly yearning for a swift death — before rescue came in the lilac-clad form of Anké Stattenholme.

The Duchess seemed to float into the scene, the sureness of her smile stunning amid the strained, scowling men. She seemed to acknowledge their festering tension not at all. “Ah, Lord Cullough! My husband begs your attention, he is having some argument about Adalan wine — Land’s Own, good evening, I believe Freiherr Kopfler is looking for you — young Fro Saul.” The smile she offered Saul was her brightest yet. “The court is afire with rumours about you. Will you not come entertain us ladies for a little time with stories of your exploits in battle?”

Something in her voice, her manner, was like a blade slicing cleanly through a knot. Cullough turned to her and his own smile returned, his companion following with an air of beatified relief. Detrich let out a breath and looked at Saul, and at the Duchess, and finally waved a hand.

“Go, if you wish.”

Saul cast a glance across the ballroom at the gaggle of court ladies gathered on the far side, golden and glittering, drinking their dark wine from their crystal glasses. Abruptly he felt torn. The action would be all at Detrich’s side, but the sweet-smelling treats, the light and music…

The Duchess took his arm. Her touch was so delicate that he almost didn’t jump to feel it unexpected, and in the space of a breath she was steering him away.

He lost sight of Detrich quickly. But Anké Stattenholme did not lead him to her fellow court ladies, but past them, to the back of the room where a raised dais held a large, empty throne and a smaller one containing a forlorn-looking Kaiserin. They slipped to one side of that platform and toward a small door, through which the Duchess all but dragged Saul, pulling him into an antechamber that was almost plain: only one chair upholstered with velvet, and one bouquet, and a large mirror above an intricately carved wooden chest. On the chest stood a tall glass full of a sparkling pinkish liquid, and the Duchess picked it up and took a great gulp of it almost before the door was closed behind them.

“Oh,” she sighed out, seeming quite unconcerned with Saul’s stare. “Thank Mother Sun and thank my husband’s vineyards. A year of my life to be in my sitting room with my little books… Goodness, you wear this much better than I expected.” She looked him up and down. “Your hair is dreadful, though. Had Detrich not told you to cut it?”

“His hair is longer than mine,” said Saul, who could not for the life of him conceive of something smarter to say.

“That is a silly excuse. You need not follow his bad example.”

“It looks good on him.” Music was still drifting in from the ballroom. He peered at the still half-full glass. The sweet aroma was making the conviction of his faith hard to remember. “What’s that made of?”

“This is a rosé from my Emen’s own estate. Do you not know —” She snatched the glass away from under his fingers. “At least he had the suit fitted for you?”

“He didn’t. The housekeeper’s seamstress friend did.”

“Sun’s grace.” The Duchess looked mildly scandalized. “Did he teach you anything about behaving in society?” She pulled her hand away again and half spun to put her back to him, the sweet smell out of his reach. “The Hyemi court is particular. There is _conduct._ ”

Saul shrugged as he spun along with her. “He doesn’t care, so why should I?”

“Oh, you —” She raised the glass over her head but just a moment too late. His fingers found the stem, and she loosened her own grip rather than risk spilling the wine. “You are worse than my brother was at half your age —”

“Is it good conduct to be in here with me?”

“I did not say I _enjoyed_ this duty, but one cannot be utterly ignorant —” She watched defiantly as he sniffed at the glass, then inhaled deeply of the heady fumes. “Are you going to drink or not?”

Saul looked at her. “Easterners aren’t allowed —” She cocked her head to one side, one hand resting against her hip, and her eyebrows climbed at his scoff. She continued to look at him so until, egged on as he had not been since his last ring-fight with another young commander, he tipped the glass back and emptied it in one swallow.

It had much more of a burn than he’d expected. Instantly he began to sputter and cough, and Anké glanced fearfully at the door and shushed him, very low and frantic. He sucked in air, and his coughs trailed off into a laugh. “It’s good!” He could _taste_ the pink of the drink, feel the bubbles all the way down his throat. He glanced hopefully toward the door. “Is there more?”

“Yes — no!” She grabbed his arm again as he reached for the door handle. “You cannot barge out there and drink yourself into a stupor like an absolute boor. The ladies are expecting an introduction.”

“The ladies who want my war stories?”

“Oh, they do not want your _war stories_ , you ruffian. You are young, handsome, and terribly exotic — the most exotic creature they have seen since my own arrival! They will want to ask you silly questions of your people’s silly customs, and to dance with you. Can you dance?”

“I’m a soldier, not a —”

“Nonsense. Even Detrich can dance if he must.” She pursed her lips and studied him while he mulled over the resulting mental image. At last he was feeling a touch indignant at this apparent gap in his learning. The wine was getting to his head. He didn’t jerk away as Anké took his left hand and placed it on her own shoulder, then clasped his right in hers. “Here, the man should lead, so do as I say…”

She instructed him through the steps, across the small antechamber and back, brisk and springing. Inevitably he stepped on her foot, and her look was one of stunned betrayal. He laughed. She hissed at him to be quiet through a mouth curving up at one corner. She showed him how to hold up their linked hands for her to circle under, and sighed and spoke of dancing with her classmates, with girls taking turns leading and sometimes forgetting whose turn it was and devolving into a stumbling, giggling chaos. She told him he was better than her little brother: at least he didn’t step on her on purpose.

The basic steps were easy to master. Soon Anké surrendered the lead to him, and Saul moved through them smoothly, enjoying the movement for its own sake. In the ballroom beyond, the music had swelled and was seeping through the door in a lively background murmur, and Anké gasped as they glided past the chest, barely avoiding crashing into it, for a moment almost afraid. Saul pictured the ballroom, the brilliance, the thrumming golden air, all surrounding him along with a hundred and more fascinated gazes. His feet were light, and something in his core felt warm.

He didn’t know what Detrich would think of it, of him; or then perhaps he did know and for the moment preferred to keep moving, the sparkling wine in his belly and the music in his ears. Anké said something more while his attention was drifting, and he wasn’t ready when she took a new step so that they both fumbled. She pulled back, caught herself against the back of the chair, and gave a soft breath of a laugh.

“We must go back or tongues will wag.” She patted her hair smooth with a wistful look. “You are… you wear my brother’s suit well. I suppose that will have to do for your presentability. And no war stories.”

“I can’t promise,” Saul said cheerfully, but let her lead him back out into the ball.

* * *

The smell of the tobacco clung to the back of Festus’s throat, or maybe it was the smell of dozens, hundreds of good beeswax candles. He could barely calculate how many hours of good work could have been done by the light that brightened one evening of pleasure in one ballroom. Better not to think of it. _Only a few hours. Trying to be patient, aren’t you?_

He’d lost sight of Saul in the crowd, and couldn’t blame the boy for preferring it so. The young exile, child of civil war — he didn’t see the cracks and pits, the singed patches that were Festus’s only comfort, evidence of the ruin the palace had almost come to in the last days of the revolution. This wing with its façade and grand ballroom had been repaired at the cost of the others, to let state visits, ceremonies, official business of all sorts continue with as little disruption as possible — and their accompanying delights, of course, such as he was enduring now. It was gilding on a bloody scab. But he’d seen how absorbed Saul had been in the colour, the music, the light, just as he had seen him glow wearing the Duchess’s suit.

He could understand what it was like, to be a boy and have such a world open before you. He could still understand.

Either way, the brat had no particular duties to keep him. But Festus did, and the scene with Cullough, for all its satisfaction, had made them difficult to pursue. The other guests were nervous around him. No one caught his eye. Kirschen would have smoothed things out, but Kirschen was languishing at the border. And Festus was here, under the radiant light of an obscene amount of money dribbling away, his back to a wall and his gaze on a glittering crowd that did not look back.

It made no difference; he never expected them to. He shook his head, and pushed through looking for Freiherr Kopfler.

They met halfway across from two opposite corners, the Freiherr detaching himself from a group of laughing companions of his own rank. Max Kopfler had changed very little from his and Festus’s university days, neither by the revolution, nor by the death of his brother and his assumption of the family’s estates the year before. He still looked young and very handsome, and perhaps dressed with just a touch more restraint than most, and he smiled at his old classmate turned Land’s Own Guardian as though nothing between them had changed, either.

“Ah, Detrich — Land’s Own, I mean.”

“I told you not to bother, Max.” Standing on ceremony was a paltry barrier against the memories that hung over their conversation. Kopfler’s smile broadened a touch as Festus looked him up and down. “You look well, I suppose.”

“You look tired.”

“Is that new?”

“Surely you’re not up all night arguing legal theory these days,” Kopfler said with a laugh, and Festus decided he was too tired to correct him. He gave a final nod toward his companions, and began leading Festus them across the expanse of the ballroom, toward the arch of one of the large windows. “Though I imagine the Land’s Own Guardian’s house must have better beds than our dormitories had.”

“So must your country manor,” Festus said dryly, and credited Kopfler for at least briefly hanging his head. “ 

“Mikkel’s death brought me no joy.”

“It did bring you the richest steel mill in the country.”

“Mm.” Kopfler’s smile was all gone, though there was a bitter amusement in his raised brows. “Tired and a sharp-tongued arse. Nothing new indeed.”

Too tired to correct that, either. Sharp-tongued, yes, they’d all liked that about him well enough. But he’d been kind back then. An optimist. _A fool_.

They came to the window in its niche, behind a pillar, marginally out of sight. Glancing outside showed Festus a driving rain. It was so for a hundred miles in every direction, the soul-web told him, and not thirty miles out of the city a weakened levee niggled at him like an aching tooth. Fifty miles south of that a large granary had collapsed, and just at the edge of his immediate awareness a village Guardian was putting all her power into keeping a field from flooding. All the while, Kopfler was talking of his steel mill, how his brother had been dutiful but neither very skilled nor interested, and how his own outlook was entirely different. “I’ve seen what a steel mill is in Adalas, in Lansikaa, even across the strait — in Meurit there isn’t a city you can’t reach by railroad. Can you imagine it!”

 _Every day_ . It was the course of the changing world, and Hyem was lagging behind, mired in old orders as inflexible as iron; and Festus had long learned that it wasn’t words that would change that. And the damned thing was, Kopfler knew as much. _He wants something, and he’s tenderizing you like a side of beef._

He gave Kopfler a raised eyebrow, cool. “You’ve done all this sightseeing since Mikkel died?”

“I’ve spent a fortune. But one doesn’t scrimp on the future.”

“Not when one’s fortune permits one not to scrimp.”

“Festus.” Kopfler leaned abruptly closer, as though they were co-conspirators already. “I owe you the truth. All my friends think this war business of yours is a vile madness, and I’d have agreed… but I have seen those mills. Not one of them would exist without an army hungry for them.”

He said it as though it were some great secret, something deep and unspeakable. Perhaps it was, at that. An ugly thing, to speak of warmaking and moneymaking in the same breath, as though it weren’t such ugliness that greased the wheels of the world. Ironic that it was men like Max Kopfler who had the privilege of pretending otherwise if they wished. _Better not to linger on it. Turn the wheels, Detrich; what else do you have?_

Low under the crash of wind against the glass, he said, “What do you want, Max?”

“I — ah.” The bluntness of it seemed to briefly half Kopfler in his tracks. Then he lowered his voice to match and spoke at a clip, “I have been speaking with certain others in the Upper House, who share my impression that war is a course both justified and appropriate. Some of the old guard, even — Brunholme, Gerstmann, a few of the Northeast Block — not enough to turn the vote as yet, but enough to crack Stattenholme’s grip. They’ve offered their names in writing for your cause. I can deliver them to you before the sun sets on tomorrow.”

His volume had dropped more and more with every word, and those last were said in one muted breath. Festus held himself still in agony. Not a day had passed since his ascension that he hadn’t wished for better skill in schooling his expression, and never had he wished for it this badly. “And your price?”

“This is a great risk for me to take when I’m not in Mikkel’s place a year, you underst—”

“Your price, damn you.”

“When you nationalize the mills,” Kopfler whispered, “as you will — and you _will_ , I know it — let me keep mine.”

It was nothing Festus couldn’t have expected, and it froze him nonetheless.

Kopfler was looking at him with those hopeful eyes, the eyes of his old classmate from a different world and a different life. A monopoly on private production. Wealth enough to push ahead of the state. In a country just beginning to industrialize properly. A handful of years and that old classmate would be the richest man in Hyem, with all the power that entailed. _On a silver platter, from your own hands_.

Those hands spasmed before he could stop them. He turned to the window, found a rail to hold onto, and tightened his grip to the edge of pain.

Then he tore his gaze from the chill glass back to Kopfler. “Do these names of yours know you mean to cut this bargain?”

“Some do, and have their own bargains with me. Some don’t. It’s politics.”

 _Their own bargains_. What would flow downstream from this decision? “How do you expect the other mill-owners to bear this?”

“What would it matter, if they’re all rendered destitute?”

“You overestimate my power to —”

“Oh, Festus,” Kopfler said in the same whisper. “We both know how this will go. You have the streets. The war vote will cement the Lower House for you, and the war will give you the army. Within the year you’ll have hollowed out the Upper House. I give the Kaiser two years more, if he’s lucky. I know a tidal wave when I see one. And I know you.”

Strange that that of all things would rouse his anger again, but at least the spike was familiar. “Know me, do you?”

“Well enough that I’d rather be your ally, and I think you could use at least one. Wouldn’t you want one you know? Weren’t we friends?”

“Oh, yes. Great friends.”

“Then what happened?”

“You made me beg on my knees for money.” _A loan, a place as your footman, anything. Just let me finish my schooling, Max, please_ — _!_ “Then you told me you had none to give.”

Kopfler shifted uneasily in place. “You understand, it was really my father’s money.”

“I do now. Have you ever had anything that wasn’t really your father’s, Max?”

He wanted to credit Kopfler for at least briefly looking hurt, but that was a kindness he’d lost, along with everything else that had been lost to him that day.

The silence stretched on — not really a silence, with the orchestra filling the ballroom and the pounding rainfall only a thin sheet of glass away. The music and thunder stayed queerly separate, oil and water, even as both filled the empty space between the two of them, Kopfler and him. Neither sound did much to fill that void.

In that rain, fields were flooding, houses were rotting. People were freezing, starving, dying. And this was the price, and the reward was war, and Festus felt caked in literal filth. _And what of it?_ said the voice in his mind, so like his own but older. _Clean hands are idle hands, lad._

Kopfler was watching him closely, and it was he who spoke first. “Set what conditions you want. Give me a renewable charter. Tax the marrow out of my bones —”

“Regulate your workers’ pay?”

Kopfler wrinkled his nose, but nodded.

“You haven’t a trace of shame, have you.”

“I will beg on my knees if you want.”

For a moment Festus pictured it, the boot to his old classmate’s face. But he would have to help him up, instead. For the country. “No.”

He turned away from the window, planted himself before Kopfler in a military stance, feet apart and shoulders squared. Kopfler edged a just-perceptible step back, into the shadow of the marble column. “I want the names by tomorrow. You’ll get your renewable charter. Five years. Non-transferrable, non-inheritable —”

“Come on, Festus…”

“— subject to parliamentary review of workers’ conditions. I’ll put it in writing for you. Now get out of my sight and leave me to be sick in peace.”

He did credit Kopfler with responding with a single swift bow and walking away before the satisfaction could begin oozing off of him.

He left behind a tall glass, still half-full of sparkling pink liquid. Probably appallingly sweet, but sometimes liquor was liquor, and bitterness had lodged itself deeply into Festus’s throat. Kirschen would have steered him away from it, but Kirschen was far away. He drank it in one gulp. The evening had barely begun.

Much and more to do, still, within that throng of joy and colour and spinning schemes. He watched the rows of dancers, marking faces, and his eye caught Saul in the front, still with the Duchess Stattenholme. The lad commanded his own little crowd, young wellborn women drawn to the fine figure in scarlet and gold. His sharp smile made them beam and giggle. Clean, sleek, and healthy, without the weight of hateful wariness curling his body into itself, Saul Samaren glowed with an almost terrifying confidence of youth that knew its own potential, and looking at him for too long made Festus’s chest ache.

 _He’ll have to learn,_ said the old voice. _He’ll have to learn the truth of this world_ . But for once he was able to snap back at it, _He already knows. Let him be. Let him live._

Only a few hours. He left Saul to the light and the laughter. The Prime Minister was just leaving the dances with his wife, he noted instead, and would need to know about Kopfler’s promise. Likely he’d be pleased, relieved that a new diplomatic avenue had opened. Well enough; it was Festus’s duty. The Prime Minister was not a soldier. _But you_ — _you mustn’t forget what you are_.

Clean hands were idle hands. _Yes, Father. I remember._

* * *

The storm was rampant over the capitol when they finally left the palace, but Saul barely noticed and cared not at all. A sweet warmth was in his belly and flowed down through his gently weary limb. The Duchess’s Hyemi-style suit no longer felt heavy nor stiff now he’d spent some hours dancing in it, the adoring court ladies looking on. He sat back against the cushion of the slowly swaying carriage and listened to the rumbling thunder, idle, smiling, not trying too hard to catch Detrich’s gaze where he sat opposite.

The Land’s Own wasn’t looking at him, really. He sat with his head leaning on one hand, staring out the window at a view curtained by rain and darkness. Strangely quiet, all things considered. He’d not called for Saul at any time before their departure, nor said anything about the company Saul had kept at the ball, the dancing, not even the food. _He isn’t angry_. That was perhaps the strangest thing of all.

At last, Saul tried, “She’s taught me to dance. The Duchess.”

Detrich’s gaze didn’t leave the window. “I saw.”

“Only a little. I’d like to know more, I think. She said you know how.”

“I do.”

“But you didn’t, tonight.”

“No.”

The sound of the rain soaked into a drawn-out silence. Saul turned his own gaze to the glass, dismayed to find a vague irritation creeping through his contented haze. _At least be angry with me._

But Detrich said nothing more until they reached the house. It was dark inside, all fires long banked and candles snuffed out, but an odd smell caught Saul’s attention. It caught Detrich’s as well, and he made straight for the kitchen with a low sigh that spoke of many things, but mainly of relief.

There in the kitchen a lamp was burning, and by its light was laid a dish that Detrich uncovered to reveal a small heap of potato peels. They’d been fried in scarce oil and sprinkled with cheap yellow cheese. A little blob of a meal, almost laughable to look at on a stomach full of palace delicacies.

The Land’s Own Guardian of Hyem sat down and fell to.

Saul watched him from the kitchen door, vaguely confused at his obvious hunger. All those hours surrounded by dish after fine, fragrant dish… “Didn’t you eat anything at the ball?”

Between bites, Detrich spoke low, “I can’t stomach that stuff.”

He might even have been speaking literally. Saul didn’t know. He watched for another long moment, a silent one in the dark. He didn’t understand, and a part of him reared in its own frustrated anger at that. But another thought of Basholme’s words: _There are places in him none of us can reach._

He came in, pulled up a second chair. Settled into it by the table, at Detrich’s side.

Detrich looked at him only briefly, one glance, eyebrows raised over eyes hollow with exhaustion. He said nothing; and yet the silence was not what it had been the moment before. The clocks rang three chimes past midnight. Now that he was home and sitting down, Saul’s body was heavy and his eyelids heavier. But he folded his arms on the table, laid his chin down on his hands, and stayed.


	12. A Civilized Country

It was Mia’s waiting for an evening when Detrich was out to call in her favour that made Saul suspect he was in over his head.

She’d clearly planned it, and with care. Detrich had left early that day, taking Alamann with him, and was not due to return until morning. No word had yet come from Emen Stattenholme, and Saul was languishing in idle frustration when the housekeeper came out of the kitchen with a basket of sweet rolls and started by offering him a pair. It was the offer of two that made him suspicious, though he still took both, and followed her out the door readily enough. He’d been doomed from the moment he took her bargain, anyway.

He had expected the market, perhaps, but Mia led him past it and to an odd corner of the city that was the university quarter. Saul had gone there only once before, with Detrich, who had spent the better part of an hour laying out the history of the capitol’s university to him with a passion rare even for him, only to slam shut like a door in the face when Saul asked if he’d studied there himself. As sunset was kissing the top of the great building’s clocktower, Mia turned a corner into a narrow side street and waved hello to a pair of girls standing by a gate at its far end.

“You don’t need to know their names,” she told Saul. “In fact it’s better if you don’t. Just do as I tell you and don’t ask any questions.”

“You’re only making me want to ask more.”

“That’s because you’re a little brat. Didn’t Fro Detrich tell you to treat my word as his own? I should’ve let you go to the ball with half your clothes undone.”

“Is this him?” The taller of the two girls squinted at Saul as he and Mia reached the gate. She had mousey-brown hair cut very short for a Hyemi girl, and something about her face and voice struck a note of familiarity. “I thought he’d be bigger.”

“Do you know those little cats that have the sharpest, most horrible claws?” Mia asked, while Saul cast about in his recent memories and finally came up with the name.

“You — are you Lisel Furst’s daughter?”

Both girls gave a start, and the taller one levelled him an almost accusing glare. Mia mumbled darkly under her breath. “Damn it all, I forgot…”

“I’m Sofia Furst,” the girl said stiffly. “What is it to you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I work here.”

“We cook for the professors’ table,” the second girl put in, more softly. “We earn our wages fair. We’re doing nothing wrong —”

“Of course we aren’t.” Sofia jerked her head up in a gesture that told him she was used to tossing long hair. The jut of her tight jaw was almost like a man’s. “Even if we weren’t employed here, the university is for everyone now. High- or lowborn, man or woman, the revolution’s made it so. We have every right to our education. More than the louts you’re here to deal with do, even!”

 _Louts to deal with, eh?_ Saul’s spirits immediately rose. He grinned lazily at the fretful-looking Mia as she pushed the gate open, and was the first to enter and find, sure enough, four young men standing just inside.

He wouldn’t have called them louts: all four were well dressed and slick-haired. About the girls’ age, but taller, cold-eyed and well-fed sons of wealth. None of them carried anything like a weapon. They wore tailored Hyemi suits of stiff, heavy fabric. Students, he thought. Except that there were four of them to his one, they were almost a disappointment.

The looks they gave him were baffled. But almost instantly, Sofia stepped up to his side, and they eyed her with icy hostility.

“Frowe Furst,” one said. “It grieves me to see you here again.”

Sofia matched him glare for glare. “It’s quite mutual, Brentholme.”

“It is near inconceivable to me to consider striking a woman, but your absurd insistence —”

“Get out of my way. I have class to attend.”

“The class is not for you, do you not understand, Frowe Furst? It is bad enough we must now share the halls of learning with the sons of butchers and shoeshiners. Your sex spits on this institution with your frivolous whims of —”

“ _Move_ ,” said Sofia, and shoved him back.

The student had not been expecting anything of the sort; he stumbled back against his fellows, almost losing his balance entirely. Colour rose brilliant in his cheeks. He darted a glance back at the other three, and realized his friends’ eyes were all on him. Watching to see what he would do. 

Saul grabbed Sofia’s arm and pulled her behind him just as the student surged back forward with a hissed, “ _You little tramp_ —”

“None of _that_ ,” Saul told him, grinning still.

The ready violence in the student’s eyes stuttered. He drew halfway back, exchanged glances with his comrades again, and squared himself as they brought up his rear. “Who in damnation are you?”

“I’m with these frowen. You’ll let them through and not bother them again.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll kill every one of you.” Behind him, Mia cleared her throat. Saul glanced back from the pale faces to find her scowling. “No? Mm. Can I break their arms? Legs?”

Mia seemed to consider this. The students were shifting in place, looking at each other, as though unable to decide which of them would test the proposition. “There are four of us,” one of them said, not with any great confidence. “And fighting isn’t allowed on the grounds —”

“Frowe Weber,” Saul said, with menace and with cheer. “Fro Detrich said I’m to follow your word as his own. What is your word?”

“Just give Brentholme a good what-for,” the third girl said quietly.

Sofia Furst said: “Smash their heads open.”

“Just their faces,” Mia settled at last. “Noses, teeth, and the like. Make them _show_ the beating they took.”

The first student tipped over again from wariness into rage, and his three fellows charged in right behind him. 

After that it took maybe thirty seconds.

Saul swept his stray bangs back with a bloody fist and stood idly sucking on his scraped knuckles. Knocking out teeth barehanded was a risk sometimes, but Mia had been specific. The three girls were huddled together, subtly clinging to each other as they stared down at their tormentors, each a moaning bundle on the cobblestones. Sofia reached out with one foot to nudge a fallen tooth with the very tip of her toe.

She detached herself from her friends and came to stand directly over Brentholme. He looked up through streaming eyes and mumbled through swelling lips, “You bitch, I’ll have you all arrested —”

“ _Try it_ ,” she hissed at him. “I want to see you stand in court while Festus Detrich’s housekeeper and his ward testify against you. I want to hear you tell how one foreign boy beat four of you to the ground!” She raised her foot, clearly debating a kick to his stomach. Her posture was very bad. Saul nudged her shoulder.

“Not like this. You’ll overbalance.”

Her gaze was still wild as she turned to him. “Can you show me how?”

Mia didn’t object, so they spent a pleasant few moments perfecting the technique between the four men. Sofia wasn’t quite a natural, but made up for it with enthusiasm. When at last her friend tugged on her sleeve and warned that they were late for their lecture, she finally stood back, fixed her loosened shoe, and said, “Fro Samaren, would you meet me here in two hours’ time? I want to talk to you.”

With Mia’s approval, Saul spent the two hours strolling through the quarter, eating a cheap meal in a beer hall crowded with students, watching the young people of the capitol about their business. Most were in the mould of the youths he’d tussled with, well-off young men with something of a rarefied air. But the beer hall was packed with a different sort. Here were plain clothes and the occasional rags, battered books spilling out of worn packs, thin weary faces with eyes that hungered for more than food. At one table sat five young women all with hair cut short like Sofia’s, who drew together like a wild pack ready to defend its own. Here there was a constant buzz of discussion punctuated by raised voices. Someone slammed an open palm against the table and said for the whole room to hear: “It’s an insult to Fro Detrich that he came, and we ought to drag him from Stattenholme’s mansion and toss him in the Essine.”

 _War_ , Saul thought idly between forkfuls of roast cabbage. Interesting; no one here was anything like a soldier, but he thought a good number of them would be happy to swap their books for guns.

By the time he returned to the gate, the four students he’d beaten were gone, and a drizzling rain had washed away the blood. Sofia was waiting for him, and not alone. At first glance her companion did not look so different from the young men she’d so gleefully kicked while they were down, a fine-boned fellow with carefully trimmed hair who held himself with confidence. But this man was dressed more plainly, if not poorly, and seemed untroubled by being shorter than his female companion. He took a step forward to offer Saul his hand.

“Fro Samaren? It’s a pleasure. I’m Yunas Geitenholme.”

The name made Saul yank his own hand back. Under his glare, Yunas tightened his jaw and shut his offered palm into a fist as he let it drop. “I beg you not judge me for my family.”

“But they _are_ your family.”

“The Freiherrin is my aunt. My father’s sister. I was sent to university to… correct me, in her eyes.” His face tightened further, and Sofia grabbed and squeezed his hand. “It did correct me, but not as they planned.”

“Yunas was a spoiled arse,” Sofia put in with great fondness. “Now he’s a revolutionary arse.”

Of that, Saul wasn’t altogether sure what to make, but he liked the way Yunas was looking at him, a kind of held-back challenge, as though he wanted a go but was wise enough to know he stood no chance. As though he were considering his other options. “There are a few of us,” Yunas said after a little time. “Noblemen’s sons who have had our eyes opened. Some other students as well, who aren’t happy with — politics.”

Wariness crept its spider-legs way up Saul’s spine. “Politics?”

“At the university, to start with,” Sofia filled in. “Groups like Brentholme’s, terrorizing women and commonborn students. There are rows in the beer halls, sometimes on the street.”

Yunas nodded sharply. “It’s worse since the attempt on Fro Detrich’s life. The things some of them say —”

Hissed Sofia: “They say it’s a shame the shooter missed.”

Another nod from Yunas. “We can’t let these words stand.”

“We need to be _ready_ , Fro Samaren.” Sofia caught his eyes with her own. Fierce and fearless eyes. If what stopped Yunas was wanting to be sure of victory, what stopped her was wanting to be sure she hurt her enemy as deeply as she could. “What you did today, fighting them all off so easily — we all need to know how to fight like that. To stand up to them —”

“To protect ourselves —”

“To be prepared when Fro Detrich needs us.”

Their gazes were both fixed on him now, bright with yearning in the pall of darkness fallen on the emptying quarter. Saul turned and turned the words in his mind. Nothing that broke Detrich’s rules, not really; the prohibition was against fighting, not against teaching others how to fight. _He might even like it_ — these youths who all wanted to be his soldiers. What Saul could do with a pack of girls and soft wellborn boys, he wasn’t sure. But it would be something to do. Beyond waiting for Stattenholme to play his game, or waiting for Detrich’s next move in Parliament, waiting and waiting…

 _When he needs us_ , Sofia had said. _Maybe he will_.

“All right,” he said, nodding at their eager smiles. “I’ll teach you.”

* * *

“ — outrageous — an absolute outrage —”

“ — has no right to be here —”

“ — shameless abuse of power and position —”

“Fromen! Fromen, to order, please —!”

The Upper House floor was almost as loud and furious as a beer-hall rally. Festus leaned forward in his seat and bit into his gloved fist. _Patience._

Max Kopfler could protest all he wished about the risk he was taking; deep inside, Festus was sure he was having a grand time of it. Standing up from across the room and calling Duke Emen Stattenholme to account. What joy it must be, to be able to say it: _You have been working at cross-purposes to us from the first, obstructing the very proceedings you have been entrusted to lead, allowing personal enmities to come before the good of the country_ — oh, but that must have stung.

“I have forty-one signatures — let me finish! — forty-one demanding that the House review Duke Stattenholme’s appointment to the board —” Kopfler waved his document like a fist. The clamour behind him rose and crashed against the shouts of the Duke’s men. “Does the House dare review anything of the Duke’s anymore?!”

“This inquiry is a farce!”

“Will he head the board’s interview of Cullough? Are we to permit that?”

“Lord Cullough is a personal friend.” When Emen Stattenholme spoke, Parliament listened. His calm voice flattened every rising protest in its path. “For this reason alone, I will delegate the duty.”

Kopfler thumped the back of his chair. “The head ‘delegating’ to the arms!”

From behind the Duke, “Better than the arms punching themselves in the face!”

“Hear, hear! What’s to gain from antagonizing Adalas?!”

The Duke stiffened a touch at that. Kopfler jumped in as though on cue. “Is this it, then? Do we openly acknowledge that Duke Stattenholme is acting to protect Adalan interests?”

The room exploded in uproar. Stattenholme did not speak into it. He waited. They all looked to him, in the end.

“Freiherr Kopfler,” he said eventually, into the silence that had fallen just for him. “I wonder why you suggest that Adalan interests cannot be Hyemi interests. I should like to hear your position clearly, if you mean to make it.”

“My position is —”

“Are you calling for war?”

Kopfler paled. Festus felt his jaw tighten untill he was sure he was damaging the leather of his glove. He bit down on his lower lip instead. _Damn you, Max, you were meant to handle this better than me!_

“I am calling,” Kopfler said after a moment as sluggish as a flow of ice, into a silence that clotted the throat, “for a restoration of this House’s authority to lead the nation. You are not yet Kaiser, Your Grace.. And you are selling the honour of Hyem.”

“Is Festus Detrich’s honour the honour of Hyem?”

“Is Emen Stattenholme’s?”

Now it was the Duke’s turn to freeze, and Festus tasted blood, and ferocious hope.

Kopfler, Sun bless the bastard, spoke on quickly. “A Land’s Own Guardian was nearly shot dead, a murderous attempt on the very soul of our country, and we see nothing from you but concern for your status amidst your friends who are our enemies. You shame us all, Stattenholme. You claim to serve your homeland?”

“Do you, fro?” The breach of protocol was miniscule and a shockwave through the room all at once. “You dance around the issue, but you know precisely what flames you are fanning here. We have had a bloody revolution. Would war serve this land?”

“Better war than humiliation,” Kopfler said starkly, just as though he believed it.

The Duke said something else to that, probably something scathing, but at that moment Festus’s attention was wrenched violently inward. A flare of hot-and-cold alarm under the ribs. Three threads within the soul-web, the great arteries of power linking three Guardians, three convulsions of white fire. Terror. Desperation. _See us know us_ **_help us!_ **

Vision and sensation followed in a jumbled cascade. Twisted metal. Fire. Human skin burning. A train car on its side, bodies scattered around and crushed inside it. The deafening silence after disaster just giving way to screams. At last, the strongest of the three signals coalesced into a single lucid message, still splashed with the pain of its injured bearer.

 _Train derailed twelve miles west of the capitol. Multiple dead and injured, trapped, fire risk. Three of us, all wounded, need_ —

The pain overwhelmed the report midway through, but now Festus saw everything clearly. Knew where to focus all his awareness and his power. Parliament and all its convolutions vanished. In the starry-sky infinity of the web, he found the cluster of souls writhing within dying bodies, and the three beacons fighting for them. Healing the Guardians came first. A violent flash healing, not unlike burning a bleeding wound closed. Then channelling the power into them, the power of all Hyem to feed their need, from the sprawling web of radiance and into those grand cores of men and women Centred around the knowledge of their own strength. 

Then into the earth itself, straining across the distance. Fighting to probe the scene in his mind, picture and set it clear enough to work on it from afar. Twelve miles — not much, when he’d reached across four hundred not a week before for the broken dam. Even still worn from that effort, not much. _A small thing. Lives are ending. Get to work!_

Some time likely passed. He continued to feed the Guardians. He straightened the train cars one by one, cracked the twisted one open, buried the fires. Trickled what little power he could into the souls of the Uncentred wounded and shocked. Sent the alarm on to every Guardian within a swift riding distance. Did all he could, though some still died.

At some point he raised a pounding head, raked a shaky hand back through his hair, and saw that a vote had just concluded.

Kopfler was next to him. That was odd. Kopfler should be on the stand, making his case. The Prime Minister was on the stand instead. Speaking to Emen Stattenholme. A tight-mouthed Emen Stattenholme, faintly flushed with bitter fury. There was a rumble of speech and shouting. Kopfler’s signatories were clapping each other on the back. Kopfler was beaming down at him.

“Hah! Didn’t I tell you I had — Sun’s mercy, Festus.” His old classmate’s face fell as Festus squinted up at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

“A —” The syllable creaked in his throat; he had to swallow and cough before his voice came out more or less properly. “A train derailed. Outside the capitol. I need to work.”

Kopfler swore. “Hell’s ice.” He dropped a hand onto Festus’s shoulder — a deeply unwelcome hand, until Festus tried to rise to his feet and realized how fortunate he was to have someone to push him back down before he stumbled too visibly. “Yes, of course. You must go. It’s all well, we have what we came for today.”

“We do?”

“Oh, yes — and you missed it! Stattenholme’s just conceded to have Parliament take official testimony from Cullough. Both houses, open doors, for all the city to hear.”

It was good enough news that Festus sat blinking for a long idiot moment before it quite sank in. The scene continued to unfold all around him, a boiled-over stew of political aftershocks. Some men — and not only men in Kopfler’s camp — were already looking his way, their next moves more or less clear in their faces, pebbles contemplating an avalanche. But it was Stattenholme whom Festus looked to, in those minutes’ stolen respite from the disaster still churning at the edges of his soul where it met the web. Minutes of fierce, hateful joy, meeting the Duke’s gaze. _By springtime, you wellborn bastard. The street, the army, the Lower and Upper Houses, until you’ll wish I’d finished with you on the barricades._

Protocol demanded that he ask the Upper House’s leave to withdraw, but no one stopped Festus on his way out. Something in his eyes, perhaps. An echo of the screaming need within the web — or perhaps they were all just relieved to see the back of him. Kopfler did follow behind him with a look of mild concern. Unwelcome, just as his hand had been, and as it turned out just as timely: Kopfler was there to catch his arm when Festus nearly stumbled again on the first of the building’s steps.

“Easy — goodness, are you quite sure you’re well?”

“It’s the web.” And last week’s lingering exhaustion, and winter, and dealing with the Upper House — and none of it was important. “I may need a day or two. Cullough’s testimony —”

“Not until next week, surely. There are arrangements —”

“It needs to be carefully done. The mood in the city — if things come too soon to a head, we’ll have lost the momentum by spring.”

Kopfler shifted slightly. Uneasily. “Do you truly need to build this… public head of steam? It’s playing with fire, I feel. I’m confident my block can take the vote —”

“I’m not.” Said brusquely, but Kopfler could endure it. Freiherr Kopfler with his great faith in manoeuvring within the chambers of power, in his signatories and his deals, in his politics. No doubt having had his small victory, he now thought this would be _easy_. “The lot of them need to feel that fire at their backs. To know they cannot back out, or the people will reckon with them.”

“Yes, but…” Kopfler swallowed. _Not a soldier, eh, Max?_ “Done carefully. No barricades, hm?” His smile was weak, and so was his hand as he thumped Festus on the back, a final unwelcome touch. “We’ll speak again when you’re done with your trainwreck. Look after yourself, Festus. We all rely on you.”

* * *

“His Grace will see you now.”

How Vestgaard knew to find him leaving the poor students’ beer hall, Saul couldn’t begin to guess. He’d barely been going to the place for a week. And yet there he was, the tall mercenary, stepping out of the late-evening shadows to block his path. An unspoken “ _Now” means right now_.

“The Duke is here?”

It was an ordinary evening otherwise. Students were out and about despite the cold and the threatening rain; the beer hall had been crowded, alive with rumours about the Adalan ambassador and his upcoming testimony. Saul had just been due to join Yunas and Sofia and their half-dozen friends, all eager for some teaching. But there was something different tonight about Vestgaard’s icy eyes. The mercenary was not growling, nor giving Saul a gimlet eye. His face was as still as stone. He did not even answer the question, only led Saul away.

Down a street, up another, out of the university quarter proper — and there, in front of what looked like a clubhouse, was Duke Stattenholme’s carriage. Vestgaard beckoned Saul to climb up onto the driver’s seat with him, and set the horses at a brisk pace. Sensible, Saul thought after a moment. No one could listen in on a moving carriage.

From where he sat, though, he could just about make out the voices when they were faintly raised. An unknown man, speaking in hurried alarm — 

“— what we need to regain the upper hand. You saw how hard it hit him. He’s worn out —”

And the Duke: “— not the point. Derailments are investigated —” The carriage clattered over a loose rock in the road. “— nothing like a burst dam —”

“— winter. Accidents happen. As long as we move carefully —”

“Not ‘we’. Do you understand? If an accusation is made —”

“— sell me out, Emen?”

“— your plan, not mine. Your gamble, Freiherr.”

Saul glanced at Vestgaard to find the mercenary looking back. _He knows I heard_ . The fragments of conversation clicked together into a whole, against the stark image in his mind of Detrich in the courtyard, working himself to the bone to repair a dam, a trainwreck. _If I tell him, he could act on it. If he acts on it, Stattenholme would know I told him._

He looked away from Vestgaard and into the veil of rain starting over the city. It was cold; he tried to let it cool his bubbling frustration. _Discipline. Patience. The big picture._

The carriage stopped by a rear gate, an unlit house. A man slipped out and vanished into the shadows. Vestgaard gave Saul a nod.

The Duke looked at Saul a touch sourly when he slipped into the carriage damp from the rain, dripping onto the plush covers of the seats. He said nothing until the carriage was again moving. No light shone inside the compartment except for the occasional flash from the street. In the shifting dark, little to be seen but the occasional gleam of Stattenholme’s eyes.

“Young general.”

“Your Grace.”

He thought the Duke might have raised an eyebrow at that. “Has my wife been so good an influence so soon?”

A stupid misstep. Saul strained harder against his own pent-up tension. “It was… I liked it. The ball. I didn’t realize I’d like it so much.”

A faint flash of teeth now. “Mm, yes. I could tell. You do have a taste for refinement, do you not? Who was your father?”

“A merchant. He died at sea.” But after a moment’s thought, “My mother’s father was grand sacerdote of Tezzei.”

“There. I knew I saw breeding in you.” His satisfaction was as sincere as anything Saul had heard from him. “Now, speak freely. Ask your questions.”

Saul breathed in. He didn’t think his conviction would waver, but still, it was surprisingly hard to speak the words: “You said… Attoré would take me back, if I brought him Detrich’s head.”

“Not in the literal sense.” Though the Duke seemed amused at the idea. “But yes. I have reason to believe Attoré extremely keen to be rid of Festus Detrich.”

“Why?

“His suspicions of Hyem’s involvement in the civil war are well known.”

“Maybe it’s not Detrich he suspects. Maybe it’s your Kaiser. Or you.”

Stattenholme made a delicate sound in lieu of a snort. “A fair observation, since you have only a partial view of the field. But aside from asking what my Kaiser or myself has to gain, I will say my belief has concrete sources.”

“What sources?” Even as he asked it the thought came: “Vestgaard?”

“Astute as expected. Yes, Joost maintains some contact with his old comrades in Ilyiga.”

“And they say, if I…”

“Not in such definite terms. You must understand the degree of care and subtlety that the matter necessitates.” Stattenholme actually glanced out the window at that, nervous for an arresting split-second before he confirmed that the carriage was still moving through dark streets, now flooded with pouring rain. “But you will trust, I hope, in my ability to read the situation.”

 _Trust_ . Now it was the Duke who’d made a misstep, though Saul thought he hadn’t realised it. _He doesn’t know Detrich as well as he thinks_. “So you want me to —”

“I want nothing.” The Duke spoke quickly and decisively. “Nothing but peace for Hyem, and for Ilyiga, Sun willing. But I understand your sense of being used and trapped. Should you wish to leave the country with speed and discretion — that, I can be of help with. To get you to and past the border in safety. That is all.”

That was all, and it was crystal-clear.

Saul leaned back in his seat, against the whispering fabric of the cushions. He had a hundred questions still. The Duke was looking at him straight on, but oddly — leaning back himself, his hands folded in his lap. Calm, as though he were not discussing such treason that Saul could barely imagine. _What does it mean, to kill a Land’s Own Guardian?_

Almost idly, he asked, “Aren’t you worried about me telling him everything?”

To his shock, the Duke faintly smiled. “Do you ask if I trust you, young general?” Saul scoffed at that, and the smile widened a touch before vanishing. “But as for that, you will not understand, having grown up in civil war. What you imply of my plans is — unthinkable. Not even Festus Detrich would believe it.”

“It’s not unthinkable if you’re thinking it.”

“I am doing nothing but offering you aid in extricating yourself from the man. Everything else is your own extrapolation. This is Hyem, my boy — a civilized country.”

Those of all words seem to wrap themselves around Saul’s throat. _This is Hyem_ . Whatever else the Duke said, whatever else Saul trusted from him or didn’t — _this is Hyem, and he’s right that I don’t understand it._

Hoarsely, he said, “What should I do?”

“For now? Nothing at all, except that when you next come to speak with my Anké I shall have Joost drive you back. You may then discuss some practicalities for your departure.”

“You don’t want my — agreement? My promise?”

“Sun’s mercy, no. Your promise of what?”

Saul opened his mouth, and closed it. _If I say it, we’ll be done._

They drove back to the university quarter in silence, and Saul was badly distracted through all his session with the students — badly enough that Yunas managed to land a punch and ended up purpling in a chokehold before Saul’s mind quite caught up with his instincts. The little class did not complain when he dismissed them early, and he walked back through the last echoes of the day’s activities being folded out of the way of the night. The sky was clouded over, and the air had a fine edge. He stuck his hands deep in the pocket of his good, Hyemi-cut winter coat, and realized with tangled frustration that he had gotten little if anything out of the conversation. It had all been the Duke’s play. All he had that was new was the overheard conversation, which he couldn’t share, and Stattenholme’s connection such as it was to Attoré in Ilyiga — _that must be how he’d known about me_. But what value that could be to Detrich, he had no idea.

In the end, neither the clumsy pretend-fighting with the students nor the long walk settled his mind. He slipped in through the gate and found Detrich in the courtyard, sitting on his bench talking with Basholme, who was standing by. The Land’s Own’s back was bent and his uniform covered in black mud, like as not from sitting on the ground to work the web again. He was slowly dragging a hand down his face as Basholme spoke; flecks of that mud tangled in his hair and beard.

“Anyway, the objections are not on point of principle. It’s just a matter of finding the right excuse.”

Detrich snorted. “And selling it to Stattenholme.”

“Stattenholme has bigger worries now than keeping Ander away from the capitol. Give us a week. Kopfler can sell it to the Kaiser that bringing the dread General Kirschen back from the border would be seen by Adalas as a gesture of good faith.”

“Do your worst, Gus.” Detrich straightened with a sigh and a stifled cough. Basholme put a hand on his shoulder; Detrich put his own hand over it in return, and lingered a moment before his eyes focused on Saul at the gate.

He must have seen more in his face than Saul realized he was showing, because he exchanged a few more quick words with Basholme and then sent the Major on his way. Once Basholme was gone, Detrich waved Saul forward and cast a critical look all over him.

“Go in and get changed before we talk. You’re soaking wet.”

“And you’re covered in mud.”

“I’m used to it.”

“And I’m not?”

Detrich gave another snort, then quietly said, “Not to Hyemi winter.”

Saul had nothing to say to that. He didn’t want to go inside. All the things he couldn’t say simmered in his mind. _Stattenholme’s doing something to keep you so tired. He had something to do with the trainwreck and dam bursts._ But Stattenholme would know he told, and then he would never get the answers to his questions. Their questions. _He has a connection with Attoré. I don’t know if it matters_ . It sounded paltry. _He wants me to kill you._

Unthinkable, Stattenholme had said. Not in Hyem. If he was right, Detrich would not believe him.

He said, “I’ve heard about what’s happened in Parliament.”

Detrich actually smiled, tired but satisfied. “For a little highborn prick, Kopfler’s done himself proud. Almost worth his price.”

“Is it bad news for Stattenholme?”

“It’s a slap to the face. That _he_ is accused of collusion and disloyalty… not a decisive blow, far from it, but the Upper House will remember it when they’re backed against the wall. In spring…” He closed his eyes briefly, then fixed Saul with a sharper look. “You’ve spoken with him. Has he said anything about it?”

“He —” Saul swallowed. His right hand clutched at his side, where no weapon hung. “I don’t think he’s worried. He has plenty of other plans.”

“That’s to be expected. One step at a time.”

“Doesn’t that just keep him ahead of us?”

“Depends on the steps, doesn’t it? Mine, and yours.”

There were things Saul could not say. But there were things he always could. “Let me kill him.”

Detrich recoiled.

It was a minute gesture, easy to dismiss as a slip of control from a weary man. But Saul’s clenched hand tightened. “I can do it. He’s the head, isn’t he? Without him, the rest would go easy —”

“ _Easy?_ ” Detrich drew up where he sat, his back abruptly rigid and his eyes hard.

"Listen to me,” he said, leaning forward again to fix Saul with his look. “I should have killed Emen Stattenholme in the revolution, but the revolution is over. I won’t see such a thing done in Hyem. Do you understand?”

“I —” _This is Hyem,_ _Stattenholme did say_. “I understand.”

“Good.” The Land’s Own’s voice turned oddly gruff. His shoulders dropped. “Because it would be your death, too, lad. And I won’t see that, either.”

He finally stood up, half-heartedly stretching stiff limbs, and started back toward the house. As he passed Saul by he clasped his upper arm briefly: a much more fleeting gesture than that day when Saul had saved the waterwheel, but enough to undo one twist in the knot of frustrated uncertainty. Detrich might not believe him, but Stattenholme’s plan was moot anyhow. He just had to play along until he learned what he wanted, and trust Detrich with the rest.

 _Trust_. That, he could do.


	13. Attrition

The tension in the soul-web could be felt from across the city, and the shouting heard from every street in the university quarter. Festus cleared a path through the press of the crowd by the force of his presence in a careless hurry. He’d arrived just in time to stop open violence — probably.

The group of students, at least twenty strong, thronged before the little shopfront like a living wall. The Parliamentary guards facing them were only five, though of course they had their swords, which they clutched with grim resolve where they stood a bare ten feet away. Men and women were packed in the streets to all directions watching and shouting. A little further back, Kopfler, talking with Basholme who had three of his own men at ready. In the little clearing at the centre of it all, Alsie Baier — still the only Guardian on the scene, though Festus had summoned more — ready to jump in between two men exchanging furious words: Freiherr Yorgen Geitenholme, and Yunas his son and heir.

And to top it all off, just to the side of the shopfront — not quite with the students, but eyeing them with great interest — there was Saul. _What’s_ **_he_ ** _doing here?_

“Fro Detrich!” As soon as Yunas registered Festus’s presence he turned from his father, and the students all turned their attention along with him. They didn’t move from their positions, but all of them spoke at once.

“Fro Detrich, we —”

“ — to stop this —”

“ — our right!”

“ — tell those dogs —!”

Young voices full of fire; it did the heart good to hear, or would have if that fire had not been faced by ready sword-points. Festus raised a hand to ask for silence and received it, just barely. The soul-web was simmering hot around him as he marched up to Freiherr Geitenholme.

“What’s going on here?”

If nothing else — and there was very little else — Yorgen Geitenholme could be credited with looking him in the eye, though he eyed Kopfler and Basholme with rather more bemusement as they approached. “Land’s Own. I am here to enforce the closure of an unauthorized publication.”

“What publication?”

“It’s perfectly legal!” Yunas snapped, surging forward in defiance of his father’s glare. “The law recognizes our right to publish as scholars — Fro Detrich, tell them!”

Geitenholme puffed a breath out in contempt. “This is no scholarly publication. These agitators —”

“Watch that word with me, fro.” Likely it was a mistake to antagonize the man over this, of all things, but Festus was tired. _Tired_.

Sure enough, Geitenholme bristled. “These _agitators_ are spreading vile lies about Duke Stattenholme.”

“From what I saw, the pamphlet gives nothing but the truth of what happened in Parliament,” Kopfler chimed in. From the corner of his eye, Festus noted with dismay that Saul, too, was coming closer. There was an odd look on the lad’s face as Kopfler spoke on. “Is it not an established fact that the Duke was censured for a conflict of interests in managing the inquiry?”

Geitenholme growled, “An opinion expressed by individuals, not a motion passed.”

“Quite a few individuals, Yorgen.”

“That’s beside the point —”

Festus held up a hand again. They’d get nowhere arguing the nuances of legality, least of all with the crowd around them. Crowds weren’t much for nuance. _And the law is a tool for those who make it_. “Who issued the order? Not Parliament. I’d have been informed.”

“Parliament,” Geitenholme said scathingly, “does not owe you a report on its every activity, Detrich. Not yet. Oh, do shut up, boy,” he snapped at his son when Yunas opened his mouth with a look of outrage. “Go back to your little miller’s girl. Certainly you’re better suited to father her whelps than heirs for my house. And you, _Freiherr_ Kopfler, what precisely is your play? This has come down from the Kaiser himself. You do recall we have a Kaiser, don’t you?”

Kopfler shrank back — Festus expected little more from him, after all. But Basholme, the old soldier, did not withdraw an inch. He locked eyes with Geitenholme and matched his snarl. The crowd’s rising tension roiled on their faces, in their mutterings and in the soul-web. Someone shouted: _Down with Stattenholme!_ and _The Kaiser promised a free press!_ Someone else, _Land’s Own, we stand with you!_ At his side, Festus saw, Saul was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. Ready, eager, straining. _This has to stop_.

But he could not back down, not in the face of the protesting students. _Not before the university, damn you all_ . He would have been one of their number, in another life, inasmuch as that had ever been a _life_ and not a desperate dream. The streets were his — he had one more play. “Nothing is being closed here, Geitenholme. Leave.”

“You can’t mean to defy the Kaiser’s order.”

“Watch me.”

“On what authority?!”

“That of your own people around you.” Festus spread his arms. The rage of the web was at every nerve ending in his fingertips; he drew it in, soaked in it, swallowed it. He knew how it lit up his eyes. “Go ask the Kaiser if by his order he meant a riot. Ask him what the closure of a student pamphlet is worth to him. Ask the going price of Emen Stattenholme’s slighted pride.” The murmurs intensified at that. _Just as well_. “And if he is willing to fund the extravagant bastard.”

Still, he was honestly surprised when Geitenholme drew back with a curt nod.

Curt, not easy; the nobleman’s face was red, and his fingers twitched when he motioned the guards to gather around him. It was a bitter surrender, sure to fester. But it was a quick one. Even the students protecting the shopfront with their bodies seemed amazed, before Yunas started a wild cheer at his father’s turned back.

“A free press for a free people!”

His comrades picked the cry up at once, and the spark spread through the crowd like wildfire. For a delectable moment Festus was hearing the barricades again, the early days of military mutiny transforming into a true popular revolution, as this and a hundred other cries for freedom echoed on every street between rounds of gunfire. Then he was back in the here and now, Land’s Own Guardian, in the midst of his success still dizzy from balancing the push and pull of tension and of rage within the web.

The crowd would embrace him, but he walked through it, following Geitenholme and his guards with Basholme and Saul in his wake. Not likely that Geitenholme would give his imperial order another try, but best not to risk it. Best to see him away from the university quarter with all possible speed. They passed Kopfler where he now stood at the edges of the crowd. Some help he’d been when put on the spot, and still…

“Thank you for calling me here, Max.” The web would have called him sooner or later, but the little time saved by Kopfler’s urgent summons may have made a critical difference.

Kopfler nodded, looking still a touch unnerved. “In for a penny, mm? You… don’t suppose that settles it?”

Geitenholme must have heard that, because he stopped in his tracks. Whirled back around. The crowd was thin here, most of it focused on Yunas and the students back at the shopfront, and that was at least a boon as he snapped at Kopfler, “It is decidedly _not_ settled, you spineless worm. Arguing in Parliament is one thing, but spitting on the Kaiser’s direct order — and _you_ , Detrich — ” He raised a finger he was no doubt yearning to stab into Festus’s chest. “Do you at all understand the weight of your actions, or are you just enjoying yourself pretending to be a student again?”

It was a better insult than Festus would’ve thought Yorgen Geitenholme capable of. It cut him through the breastbone. “I just saved your wretched life, Geitenholme. That crowd would’ve torn you to pieces.”

“And you’d have watched, maybe given a rousing speech! Anything for more blood, you baseborn brute, you war-dog? The people follow you blindly, and look where you mean to lead them! Does it please you to see a son berate his father in the street — does it?!” He pushed another step forward, until his face was close enough for Festus to feel the heat of his breath. “Do you turn Yunas against me to spite the pig _you_ called father?”

And too sharp again. Festus didn’t know what might’ve shown in his own face, but whatever it was it set Saul jerking at his side, darting one step of his own toward Geitenholme with one fist clenched. He shot the boy a warning look, grateful for the distraction and the chance to turn his gaze away from Geitenholme, lest he show even more how deep the man’s words had gone. _Hurts so badly it must be true, eh, lad?_

Basholme spoke up while Festus was silencing that hateful voice, “Sun’s blood, Yorgen, you embarrass yourself. Go crawl back to Stattenholme, he’ll give you a pat on the head for your efforts.”

“Spare this kettle that talk, Major Pot.” Geitenholme actually made to spit at Basholme’s feet — then turned his head and spat at Kopfler instead. “Both of you. If I lick a boot, at least a real man wears it. Are you two happy to share the bed with that whore Kirschen and a little Ilyigan catamite — ?”

The instant he said it, Festus knew what would happen. And the instant he knew, Saul moved. He exploded like a hawk knifing down from the sky, a burst of deadly speed and fury —

But Basholme, somehow, by some miracle, was even faster in shoving him aside and hurling himself at Geitenholme instead. 

“You will recant that, fro! You will recant — Ander Kirschen is worth a hundred of you! You will —” 

He was still unleashing a wild torrent of insults as Geitenholme’s guards all pounced, and then it was chaos. In a split-second three of them were fighting to pin Basholme’s arms, Geitenholme was bleeding and shouting, a fourth guard was grappling with Saul, and the fifth whipped up his scabbard to smash the lad across the face with the pommel of his sword —

Festus’s power burst through the shackles of his conscious control, caught every filament of the man’s soul, and twisted them to strangulation. 

The guard made a high-pitched sound of frigid terror and crumpled into a foetal curl. The others broke away immediately to scramble back, even Geitenholme, white-faced under the blood. Basholme, bless every breath of his, had grabbed Saul’s arm and was pulling him back from snatching the fallen man’s fallen weapon. Then all was quiet, and Festus was left to curse himself.

He let the man’s soul go, watched him pull himself shakily to his feet. Poor wretch just doing his duty — and he had the right to it, much more than Festus had to treat him so cruelly. Saul was an unknown in combat except that these men must have heard some whispers of the Ilyigan boy-general’s reputation, and it _was_ Basholme who had struck first. _Damn you, Gus, that isn’t like you_ . Basholme had a temper, but he had the control to match, more than Festus did, often as not — unless he’d charged in to get in ahead of Saul. Protecting the brat. _Damn it all._

Basholme continued to curse at Geitenholme without missing a beat. “I’ll have blood of you for this, Yorgen, I’ll have satisfaction, landed or not I have my title and my rights — draw your sword, fro! Answer a challenge from an equal!”

In the throng of his guards, Geitenholme had recovered just enough to sputter back, “What rights?! You’ve had blood already. I should drag you before a military court — you and the little beast —” He turned to glare at Saul, who spat at him, and the facts of the matter dawned on Festus cold and clear: _I can’t extricate both of them._

“Gus,” he began hoarsely, only to see the Major shake his head.

“Leave the boy be, you base coward. I struck you. I’ll stand for it.”

“Gus.” More urgently now. Festus took a step forward, made to grab for Basholme’s arm, although it was a mistake — to show hurt again, let Geitenholme claim a victory. “Listen to me —”

“Hell’s ice, no, Detrich, _you_ listen.” Basholme turned to him, caught his shoulder and drew him close. “I’m a nobleman and officer of Hyem. I will not be cowed. You look after the lad, do you hear me? He has nothing and no one but you. Look after him. And I’ll have his hide if he doesn’t look after you!”

There was nothing to do beyond that. Geitenholme and his guards marched Basholme away, and Festus was left standing in the street, feeling as though his good left hand had been cut off.

Not alone, though: Saul was still at his side, shaken and shaking, breathing like a bellow with rage steaming in every breath. He cast Festus a look half of yearning and half accusation. _Why didn’t you let me fight?!_

And the street — there were still people about them, drawn in by the noise of the scuffle, and _Fro Detrich, are you well, what can we do._ But right now they could do nothing to correct a situation that was not of their own making to begin with. Festus waved them off, pushed subtly at the web to turn all attention away from himself and his ward on the long, cold walk home.

That long, cold walk did nothing to calm his anger or Saul’s. They were barely through the gate before they whirled on each other.

“What was my rule about fighting?!”

“I should’ve gutted him right there!”

“ _Should have,_ Sun’s sake! They would’ve dragged you away —”

“What, five of them? I can handle —”

“They’d have _hanged_ you, you idiot!” Did Saul truly not understand? It seemed far-fetched. The lad was plenty ignorant, but nothing like stupid. It was something else. “Is that how you want to end? Because some wretch like Geitenholme ran his mouth off about you?”

" _Me?_ What do I care what he says about me? Plenty of men tried to make me their — to do what he said with me. I killed them." Saul's face didn't even twist at the memory. "But you — I know why you brought me here."

Festus ground his teeth. _At least that._ "So what was that? If not some attempt to defend your damned honour —”

"Not my honour, _yours_!”

He didn’t quite shout, but the force in the words caught Festus utterly off his guard. Even the old voice in his mind — which always had a thing or two to say about honour — was silent.

Saul was giving him a ferocious glare. _Why didn’t you let me kill for you?_ Festus was tempted to cuff him upside the head. He was tempted to — well.

Trying to take the lad in his arms would likely end with Saul doing them both some damage. But something in his tight posture did ease when instead Festus went to his bench, pulled the chest out from under it, and retrieved two weighted practice swords.

He threw one at Saul. Hurled it, really. Saul caught it with ease, snapped automatically on guard. “You leave my honour to me,” Festus hissed as he came at the lad, saw Saul’s eyes grow keen and bright with the pleasure of power, of movement, of rage given release. “Didn’t I tell you I refuse to be ashamed? Why don’t you _listen_ , you damned brat?”

Saul had heard what he’d said to Basholme. He caught the echo in Festus’s words now as swiftly as he caught the swing of Festus’s sword with his own. “What’s going to happen with the Major? Will they hang him?”

“Not hanged — but fined a pretty fortune for Geitenholme’s bruises. Certainly thrown out of the city, Sun knows for how long.” _And I needed him. Gus, my friend_. “He was protecting you.”

“I didn’t ask him to!”

“And _yet!_ ” Their swords locked again, and Festus twisted his, drove all his fury into his greater strength to wrench the training blade from Saul’s hand. He caught the lad by surprise; Saul was used to method in Festus’s fighting, to economy. Discipline leashing power to its purpose. Not this time. This time he blinked when he couldn’t afford to, lost his grip and his weapon, slipped with breath-taking skill out of the way of the jab that followed, and danced around his pivoting opponent to slam a vicious punch into Festus’s side just under his ribs.

It was masterful. Festus had a split-second to appreciate it before he felt the full shock of the blow. The breath he’d sucked in on reflex tumbled out in a seizing cough, one that overwhelmed him until he had to lean gasping on his sword. The faint rasp that had sat in his throat for — was it two days? he’d only half noticed — but now the feeling swelled into pain that didn’t fade even after he had his breath back.

Winter, sinking its claws in. Taking its own share of his strength. _And even you only have so much._

Saul had retrieved his own weapon, of course, but otherwise stood a little back and watched while Festus recovered. There was a strangely lost look in his eyes. He glanced down at his sword, but only raised it again with some visible hesitation.

 _No. None of_ **_that_ ** _._ Festus drew himself up again into a fighting stance. “Sloppy,” he snapped at the lad. “You should know better than to let a crippled enemy rest. Next time, finish me.” There was nothing more he could do now for Basholme, for what had happened. But the fight wasn’t done, so crippled it would have to be.

* * *

_He isn’t well._

The thought gnawed at the back of Saul’s mind, circled round in it all morning through his training and his chores, through the walk to Duke Stattenholme’s mansion. Detrich had fought him to a standstill through a dozen passes the previous evening, but by the end was breathless and drenched with sweat. Twice in the night Saul had awoken to hear him coughing. Mia made a pointed comment about the house’s heating bill over breakfast, and Detrich didn’t even protest, just told her to do as she wished — though he gave her a sharp look when she opened her mouth again, and she fell silent and left him to cough some more over his barely touched plate.

 _He isn’t well_. And Saul had no more idea what to with that than he had of how to make the Duke answer his questions.

By now his visit to Stattenholme’s house almost followed a routine. He came to the door to find Vestgaard. The mercenary asked some idle questions about battles Saul might have fought in, but answered Saul’s own questions with grunts or open disregard. A maidservant glared at him all the way up the curving staircase. He was let into the same room as before with its great window and balcony, except that the window was shuttered and curtained and a great fire burned in the hearth.

Anké Stattenholme stood by the fire, holding a handful of paper sheets. Her face was the colour of chalk.

Saul’s whole body tensed, and the maid gave a visible start. “Your Grace…?”

Anké looked up, though her eyes stared blindly for a moment. Her lips worked. Her voice was hollow when she at last recognized their presence. “Oh, Marté — Fro Saul, your pardon, I will — need a moment. Marté, bring him a hot drink. I will come soon. Yes…”

In a quick trembling gesture she dropped the papers into the fire. As she passed Saul on her way out of the room she gave him a curtsy, but it was the twitching gesture of habit in the face of horror.

For once Saul had reason to be thankful for the silent and automatic obedience of the mansion’s servant. The maid left the room with nary a glance back his way. The moment the door had closed behind her, Saul leapt for the fireplace.

Even plunging his hand right into the fire — it hurt, but an unexceptional pain — he managed to rescue only charred remains, and then had to puzzle his way through the Hyemi writing on the scraps. Suddenly he was feeling like a fool for resenting Detrich’s lessons. After some squinting and sounding out words, he found the first sheet.

It was a letter. Addressed _Dear sister._

Perhaps the brother who originally owned the scarlet suit. Saul had thought he was dead, he wasn’t sure now why, but the letter was dated to barely a week before. It began: _Know that_ _I write this under duress from Mother_ before great charred holes began to gape. Scarce clear patches remained. _Dangerous to write_ and _should know all I’ve done, in case_ and _you do not enjoy your husband’s full confidence._ Something about a visit in summer, _the southern border_ and _our Joost’s friend as my —_ Saul almost crumpled the paper in frustration when he found that cut off. A great blank at the centre, meaningless snatches — _departed alone_ and _prepared in hiding_ , _headless corpse_ and _a connection made_ — Stattenholme’s name once, and Vestgaard’s personal name, and — his heart skipped a beat — Gabrello Attoré’s.

And the conclusion, or all that was left of it: — _regret only that we failed._

Saul’s burned hand almost shook as he thrust the letter into his pocket, then thought better of that and stuck it down his boot. Attoré and Stattenholme, and a comrade of Vestgaard’s — this could be about his own planned return to Ilyiga. But then what had Anké’s brother crossed the southern border — the Ilyigan border — for, back in summer? Who had his companion been, and who was the corpse — and what had failed?

He went to the window, yanked the curtains then the door to the balcony open. It was drizzling outside, but it was easier to think in the cold air. He could hear faint laughter from somewhere downstairs, where Ostmann the guard might have been cheating at cards again. And then — in shock at hearing that gentle voice raised — he could hear Anké Stattenholme.

“ — that you involve my family — !”

“I am your family!” The Duke, with a desperate edge to his voice. “I do this for Amika — your daughter Amika! Would you see her grow up surrounded by war?!”

Whatever Anké’s response was, Saul couldn’t hear it. A moment later, his mind still churning, he nearly leapt out of his skin when the door opened.

The maid was back, carrying a tray with a mug that steamed and smelled sweet and unfamiliar. In her wake, looking chilled and forlorn, wandered in Gerfroy Cullough.

“Oh — Messer Samaren, wasn’t it?” The Adalan ambassador perked up noticeably at the sight of Saul. He walked up to the fireplace, and when the maid had left the mug on the table, picked it up and sipped it without a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t suppose your presence here means that Messer Detrich is coming to his senses?”

Between the interruption of his thoughts and the theft of his hot drink, Saul returned the hopeful look with a scowl. “I’m not his errand boy.” That should be the end of that.

To his irritation and surprise, Cullough responded with a sigh. He took another sip, now staring morosely into the fire. “Your pardon. It was foolish to assume. It is just that — well, you being his ward, I had hoped you might have some insight…” He put the mug down and clenched both fists. “Mother Sun’s mercy, how do I reach the man? Where do I begin?”

He sounded so sincerely miserable, Saul blinked despite himself. “Aren’t you the diplomat? What are you asking me for?”

“Yes, well. I am —“ Cullough waved one hand. “I _am_ an errand boy, it so happens, Her Majesty’s price for the hand of her daughter. I convey goodwill and have it conveyed in turn. Lansikaa, Merev, even Betairun once — but these are the ordinary affairs of the continent. We all understand each other’s interests, by and by. This Festus Detrich, he is not — he is not the type of man I deal with.”

“Didn’t you know that already?”

“I was ready for a man who does not understand — of course, one must make some allowances to his background. But he has a perfectly good grasp. He just… doesn’t _care_ .” And now Cullough looked deeply troubled. “He has no ‘interests.’ He wants war. He _wants_ it!”

 _He really is a fool._ The realization shocked Saul much more than he’d expected. It didn’t make sense. This was Duke Stattenholme’s friend — the man he’d brought to Hyemto speak to Parliament? _That isn’t a mistake a man like Stattenholme makes_. Slowly, he said, “He wants your country to pay for what you did.”

“A just enough desire — if we had done it! But to assassinate an ascendant Land’s Own Guardian?” Cullough shuddered hard. “Why, even the implication — it’s _we_ who ought to demand recompense, for the mere suggestion that we are capable of such savagery!” Something hard stole into his eyes, and he continued sourly: “But then, one must make allowances for his background. Perhaps to the butcher of the revolution, such ideas do not defy all sense.”

The look he gave Saul suggested hope for commiseration if not outright confirmation. But Saul’s mind was leagues away. _It could still have been Adalas_. Cullough’s stupidity could just mean he was the useful kind of idiot, ignorant of his own ruler’s designs. But if Saul could see through that so easily, couldn’t anyone?

 _Does it matter?_ Detrich had said as much himself: the war didn’t need to be just. If it weren’t for that maddening feeling of a connection, a secret just beyond his grasp —

Cullough at last capped off his rant with another sigh. “But I suppose I cannot expect you to have more insight than Emen does. He is a good friend, Emen. And one cannot complain of being granted access to his wine cellar... but why he asked my royal mother-in-law for me of all people, I may never know.”

He finished off the drink that should have been Saul’s, and settled for staring despondently into the fire.

Vestgaard came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, interrupting a grim silence with a grimmer look. “Her Grace won’t see you today,” he let Saul know without a hint of ceremony. Then he led him out, though not before giving Cullough a curt nod clearly calculated to quell the ambassador’s excitement at the prospect of adding Vestgaard to the audience witnessing his moping.

The mercenary muttered something foul-sounding in Lansikaan, then fell silent until he and Saul were sitting side by side on the driver’s seat of the carriage. Then, apropos of nothing, he began musing on the logistics of Saul’s homeward journey that the Duke had mentioned. “Problem is, you stand out like a strange cock in a queen’s bed. That hair. Your accent. Can you play mute for a while?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“It means no backtalk.”

Saul opened his mouth, and closed it again. 

Vestgaard grunted in what no doubt passed in his case for satisfaction. “And no fighting, whatever tight spot you end up in. What I hear about you, nothing’s as distinct as the way you fight. Leave that to my man.”

“Another Lansikaan?”

“An old subordinate.”

“Why do you all fight for the Duke? How much does he pay you?”

“I fight for the Duchess,” Vestgaard said flatly. “And what I owe her kin, money can’t buy out. So don’t you worry, mi domé, we’ll keep your Ilyigan arse clean for you.”

It was an order to start playing mute if ever Saul had heard one. But he asked nonetheless, “Did you serve her brother, too?”

A sudden sharpness in Vestgaard’s eye made him quickly elaborate, “She gave me his suit. Is he dead? Or is he in Lansikaa — is her family still in Lansikaa?“

Vestgaard gave him a look. A very different sort of look. The displeasure in this one was personal. “Still alive. Still there. Can’t very well come back with her grandfather exiled.”

This time his message got through. The rest of their conversation, such as it was, touched on nothing more alarming than the means with which to disguise Saul’s Tezzeise look. Soon Vestgaard dropped him off two streets away from the Land’s Own’s house, and Saul walked the rest of the distance through the drizzle, bracing himself to return again with more questions than answers.

He did have the letter. And Cullough’s words. If only he knew what to make of either. Baffling to think that not a month ago he’d bitterly resented both Detrich and Stattenholme for dragging him into their game. Now the riddle beat in his blood, a furious fascination. A purpose. He _needed_ to have something to give Detrich, something realer than scraps and yet more questions. He stopped at the gate to the courtyard and pulled the remains of the letter back out of his boot; yet more of it had crumbled at the rough treatment, until a good part of what he’d been able to read before was now lost.

Less in resignation, and more in the hopes of finding a partner and cause for a good row, he finally came into the house. Alamann was absent — he wouldn’t have been a help, anyway — and Mia was busy in the kitchen with something that smelled like it didn’t deserve interrupting. She did stick her head out and call after him, but Saul made right for Detrich’s office. If he didn’t have answers, at least he could have —

The office was silent. The tableau inside told its story clear enough. On the table, a candle burnt almost all the way down, an untouched dish and an empty tea mug, a much-abused handkerchief — and Festus Detrich, asleep over his papers with hair unspooled like a shadow around his face.

Something twisted itself into a knot inside the frustrated anger behind Saul’s ribs. He withdrew, shutting the door with such quiet care that his hand barely knew how he’d managed.

Mia was waiting for him in the kitchen. Without comment, she slid a bowl of steaming meat stew over to him, and watched with something like grim satisfaction as he ate.

“Sofia asked me to tell you,” she said after a little while. “After yesterday, they’re worried about meeting at the usual place. Yunas suggested one of the burned-out mansions on the river. I’ll tell you how to get there.”

“Are you finally coming this time?”

“I’m busy.” She pursed her lips, and nodded at him to keep eating.

Saul did. There was nothing else he could do. He couldn’t go back to Stattenholme’s mansion, and he couldn’t corner Vestgaard, and he couldn’t tell —

A thought came. He voiced it before another thought might have a chance. “Tell Sofia. Stattenholme speaks with people in his carriage, riding around the city. I can’t follow it around, but she has all her friends. Tell them to keep watch on who rides with him.”

It wasn’t much. Maybe it would be nothing at all. Maybe it’d be a mistake. But he couldn’t just sit there with his soup. He couldn’t just hold his peace.

Mia blinked, then nodded, once and enough. No sharp comments from her this time, no argument or even questions. But he wasn’t surprised. _No one is much for peace, here._


	14. Great Hopes

The sky was leaden on the morning of Cullough’s testimony, heavy and threatening snow. Tired of trying to convince himself he’d gotten any sleep that night, Festus dragged himself out of bed to squint and scowl at it through the window. _Are you against me now, too?_

He shivered continuously as he dressed, buttoned up his greatcoat, cast a critical look at the buttons — a perfect sheen, of course, on them and his boots, but he polished them again anyway. This was not a day for half-measures. And maybe they would compensate some for the tight, sallow face his mirror showed him. His throat was hot and dry, and clearing it felt like raking the flesh with a dull blade. Winter. Nothing to be done. _Get to work._

His fingers were frustratingly clumsy plaiting his hair. Yesterday’s ribbon was still on the bedside table. That, and Basholme’s letter. Captain Basholme now. A shameful demotion for a shameful reason, the man’s pride swinging by its neck. Kirschen stuck at the border, Basholme thrown out in disgrace, the Kaiser ordering printing houses closed, and Stattenholme wining and dining Adalas’s royal son-in-law. And all of Festus’s hopes pinned on Kopfler’s ugly bargain. While the streets churned with anger and uncertainty, and winter marched on as inexorably as only winter and death ever could.

But it was hope. And if that hope was wretched, really, it was the sort he should be used to.

Downstairs, Mia had fires lit in every hearth and the biggest of all in the kitchen. The house was stuffy and suffused with the smells of cooking porridge and brewing tea. Saul was standing by the kitchen’s large window, his bowl and cup forgotten, his nose almost flat against the glass. He glanced back as Festus entered with a look of mild ill-ease.

“I’ve never seen the sky like this.”

“It’s going to snow.” Festus considered his own bowl of porridge, considered the day ahead, and decided he could force it down quickly enough for his reluctant stomach not to get a word in edgewise. “You’ve never seen snow?” The ribbon slipped between his chilled fingers a third time as he reached up, this time to the floor; he swore under his breath.

When he bent to pick it up again the lad was there before him. “It looks better when you don’t tie it off yourself,” Saul muttered, sullen as though caught in a misdeed.

 _Of all I’ve tried to tell him, he remembers that_. Festus’s wry look did nothing at all to loosen Saul’s grip on the red leather. He sighed, and sat down for the only surrender he meant to offer that day.

It was quick, at least, quick enough that Festus had no time to linger on the calm of the moment. Next he stopped by the door to stand at attention while Mia stood on tiptoes and pulled his collar straight. She tucked a folded handkerchief into his breast pocket; he didn’t protest, but miserably hoped she was being overcautious. No orator, however brilliant, could do a damned thing with a stuffy nose. And today was not a day for half-measures.

He hadn’t many options left. And, out in the street, the people were waiting.

The foyer outside the grand hall of parliament was densely crowded, so much so that even the Land’s Own Guardian had to push his way through. An even bigger crowd had gathered outside, seemingly half the city and more come to hear Cullough testify, and to move among them was energizing and nerve-wracking alike. Here were the stakes he was fighting for, faces and voices and souls. _And you’ll give them war_ — if he could give them anything. He caught sight of Marten Furst in the throng just outside the doors, with his sons and a dozen other villagers, each wearing their own good outfit. In the foyer it was all small groups, men of the Upper and Lower Houses with their partisans trading rumours inside the circle and hostile glares out of it, and the soul-web was like a dry field before a summer storm, waiting for lightning and fire.

By the inner doors to the hall stood the Prime Minister and a handful of other Lower House men in final conference. The questions to ask Cullough would fall to them, mostly; a Land’s Own spoke in Parliament only by invitation. _Trust them to know when to invite you, what choice do you have?_ On the other side of the doors Festus found Kopfler, and next to him another man, old and grave, impeccably dressed and quietly troubled, leaning on his cane of fine white wood. The sight of the familiar face made Festus blink even as Kopfler waved him over.

“Over here — Festus, you remember Professor Aberhern?” Kopfler was smiling indulgently, as though this were some tender reunion he was overseeing between the capitol university’s dekan of law and his old student. “I have his word that he shan’t criticise our performances today.”

“I have rarely had call to criticise Festus’s performance,” Aberhern said, with faint but honest humour. He too attempted a smile, though it faded as he studied Festus’s face. “You look tired, my boy.”

 _I am tired_. If he started dwelling on it that would be the end of him. “Are you here for the testimony, Professor?” It stood to reason; the crowd outside was full of students.

Aberhern opened his mouth, but it was Kopfler who spoke up. “Professor Aberhern is attending at my request. Since this is our chance, and we may wade into complex legal waters, I thought it was best that a man I know — ah, here we are. I will be by in a moment —”

As the inner doors swung open and the crowd began to press through, Kopfler slipped back against the direction of the flow. Festus glanced backward and tried to track him with his gaze,, but lost him in a moment. Instead he had one last look at the many common people who were too far back to have much of a chance to enter. One last moment to fix the sight in his mind. Some of them waved when they caught sight of him; one of the students actually leapt up to draw his attention. But in the next moment he was inside and taking his seat. The Land’s Own Guardian’s seat: distinct, elevated, away from the speaker’s dais.

He looked across the hall, past Cullough at the dais, over the heads of the delegates. There, directly opposite, he met the eyes of Emen Stattenholme.

Not a day for half measures. One more chance.

“Lord Gerfroy Cullough.” It was Yorgen Geitenholme who spoke for the inquiry board, that being the compromise reached, though the Prime Minister sat by his side for at least the appearance of balance. “Please accept my regrets for putting you in this position. I understand that it is highly abnormal for a man to have to defend his country and sovereign against such a charge — ”

“But defend them he must,” the Prime Minister piped up.

Stattenholme cleared his throat, a flicker of a sound. “In turn, Fro Kleiner, if you will.”

A ripple ran through the benches. The crowd of city folk packed tight into the inner balcony, in the back behind the seats, shifted and murmured until the Duke cast his wintry gray gaze across all within the hall. The Prime Minister shifted uneasily, and said nothing more.

Festus leaned forward in his seat. Found himself biting his gloved hand again. _They’ll know when_. He had to trust as much.

Cullough squared his jaw, and answered Geitenholme as though the Prime Minister were invisible. “In frankness, my lord, between men, some accusations may only be answered by the throwing of a glove. I do this as a gesture of Her Majesty’s goodwill.”

“And we are thankful.”

“We’ll be more thankful for truth,” another board member — a Lower House man — tried. “The accusation has facts behind it — ”

“Matters of circumstance,” Geitenholme said.

Festus looked to Stattenholme in unison with all the crowd above. The Duke said nothing.

Cullough snapped, clearly encouraged: “It seems to me poor form for Hyem to leap so quickly from flimsy evidence to vile accusation. Is this what you have for Adalas, messers? Such contempt that you believe us capable of assassinating a Land’s Own Guardian?”

“That, and some bullets!” rang a voice from above.

The crowd exploded in jeers. Cullough turned an ugly crimson. Lower House men on the benches were laughing. Geitenholme struck his desk, once twice, three times to no avail. Until at last Duke Stattenholme rose to his feet, and called across the hall:

“Guards!”

The sound of thumping boots, of swords rattling cruelly in scabbards and the slap of clubs against palms ripped through all other noise. Now faces in the crowd paled and pulled back from the path of the armed men of the parliamentary guard, and silence fell brittle as thin ice, soft-footed and strangled, the silence of folk who knew what boots and clubs and swords could do.

The silence suffused Festus’s sense of the web, pressing in like a hand about the throat. He watched the Prime Minister shift uneasily in his seat. “Your Grace, this is not necessary —”

“This is a formal hearing, not a theatre. Another word and I will shut the doors.”

“The agreement —”

“Not another word, Fro Kleiner.”

The Prime Minister’s look was painful. He turned it, imploringly, across the hall. Finally he turned it to Festus; but now, of all times, Festus could offer him nothing. Not for him to negotiate Kopfler’s agreement. _Tell him where to shove it, damn you._ He glanced over, but found Kopfler’s seat empty. No help from any direction. _The people are watching. Answer for them!_

But the Prime Minister did not rise. None of them did.

After that it was a massacre, as brutal as Festus had ever seen. The men of the Lower House spoke one turn in three, if that, and often as not in a panic, asking useless questions, scrambling to speak for the sake of it. It was nothing at all for the freiherrs and grafs, the dukes and dignitaries of the Upper House to speak over them. To come to Cullough’s rescue at the slightest hint of a challenge. Nothing at all for power to bed down with power, and how had he ever imagined otherwise? _They aren’t soldiers. What’s the use of men who aren’t soldiers?_

And Kirschen was away, Basholme disgraced, the crowd silenced, and he’d taken Kopfler’s damned bargain and all he was getting for it was this —

The web twisted itself with smouldering heat around him, and he breathed in the ferment of the crowd. Cullough was delivering some platitude-cum-insult about how his own Land’s Own could offer no help, being too busy preparing for winter, and some graf made a comment about Land’s Own Guardians who knew their duty — and even some of the guards stirred in affront at that. But the tide of his own rage swelled against a chill and sluggish countercurrent. Here in the heart of power, here where they had staked their claim with rivers of blood, still every drop of rage was matched by a drop of doubt, and a drop of fear.

The Prime Minister was sweating, scrambling, struggling for a modicum of control over the room. When Cullough snapped off a harsh comment about the Guardian who had found the shooter’s corpse, and some Upper House man sighed over the reliability of witnesses, Kleiner went as far as to half-rise to his feet, protesting, “By Fro Detrich’s testimony —”

“Detrich’s testimony!” Cullough snorted. He struck the dais with an open palm. “Sun’s grace, does it come to anything but that? Detrich’s charge, Detrich’s men — does sovereign Hyem speak here, or does Detrich’s mob?”

For a moment Festus froze. The question rang through the buzzing hall — not a question to be asked in a civilized country. Not with the ghosts of the revolution hanging over that crowd. _The revolution is over_. The Land’s Own was just that. To wait for an invitation to speak to his own people was a torment. But the fighting had to be in words. If not… 

And Cullough continued, “If it’s your Land’s Own who has a quarrel with me and mine, let _him_ speak!”

He seemed to realise his misstep the moment the words were said. His eyes widened in sudden white panic as he looked to Duke Stattenholme. But every other eye in the hall turned to Festus.

Festus stood up.

This was not, technically speaking, a proper invitation. That was meant to come from Parliament, under the aegis of the Prime Minister or the Speaker of the Upper House. But the crowd had turned to him, and no one rose to break that spell. He could feel in every limb the clarion of their sudden excitement. So bright, so resonant that it briefly broke like the sun through the chill under his skin. Tired as he was, gripped by winter as he was, now he could speak. And when he could speak he could make right.

His gaze, too, found Emen Stattenholme’s, met the Duke’s look of contemplation and doubt. For the space of a breath, none but the two of them in the hall —

Almost too low to carry, and yet perfectly audible across the hall, the Duke said, “Very well, Fro Detrich. Parliament calls you to the stand.”

The eddy that ran through the soul-web was a single intake of expectant breath. Some few voices raised a half-aborted cheer, but for the most part the crowd and the benches were all riveted in silence. They were waiting for a show, Festus knew, a bloody one if possible, and if they all relied on him, then, at least they were all his own. _And you’ll give them war_.

Cullough was eyeing him nervously, as a fresh recruit might eye a cold-eyed warhorse that towered above him. Resentful of his own nervousness, mulish and perhaps a touch derisive at Festus’s shadowed eyes and the thick, unhappy sound of the Land’s Own clearing his throat. A damned town crier of a face, Festus thought, not without bitterness. Begging to be taken to pieces. “Thank you, Your Grace,” he opened, bone-dry, to a rush of titters from the audience. “I’m pleased that sovereign Hyem has at last turned the reins of this inquiry over to the people upon whom it touches.”

He could see wary calculation edging out derision in Cullough’s expression, a slow shift, as he continued, “Fro Cullough — you’ll understand my forgetting your title, no doubt, since you seem to have such trouble with mine — clarify your position to this assembly, if you will. Does Hyem charge Adalas with petty assassination, or with an unimaginable crime?”

Cullough seemed to settle on a strategy. He raised both hands, palms out and pacifying. “Now, I am sure you see the spirit of my objections —”

“Do I? One moment it’s a glove thrown, the next it’s _Detrich’s mob_. You called me up here. Do you imagine that I charge you as a private person? For compensation for the loss of my horse, perhaps?” The faint rise in tone came with a scrape of pain in his swollen throat. He drew on it. Pain had its uses. “Am I Land’s Own Guardian in Hyem or no? As I am Land’s Own Guardian, do you dismiss the fury of my people?”

“I do not understand your thrust, Messer — Fro Detrich.”

“You understand. You make light. It’s beneath the precious honour of Adalas to hear the pain and outrage of Hyem. You come to us professing friendship, then give us this farce. My people have asked you for truth. You have given no answer. Now, fro, you will answer to me.”

Cullough’s veil of renewed cordiality seemed to draw itself too tightly over his features. His throat worked. The silence of the crowd all around them now shivered with a deadly focus. From their hearts to the heart of the web. Rage and fear and doubt on a scale, trembling and tilting, and in the moment Festus held the balance in his hands.

Duke Stattenholme was looking at him through narrow eyes. Far too measured, far too considering a look.

“I will ask plainly. We have appealed to your Land’s Own Guardian to assist in our fact-finding. What have we received?”

Cullough tried a helpless shrug. “Madam D’Ubald is deeply sympathetic, but the shooter’s corpse was headless and long rotting.”

“And the gun.”

“The gun, well… a Lansikaan design, for all our troops favour it.”

“Lansikaa is no old enemy of ours. And the report of an Adalan informant in the town near the shooting?”

“We cannot confirm, as I said — please, fro, I beg you once more to see reason.” Cullough’s voice had gone halting, soft. His instinct was to try to smile. The sight of him fighting it was pitiful. “Upon my honour, I have answered every question truthfully. I do not know what you would hear from me.”

“I would hear you commit to a true investigation, to begin with.”

“I — haven’t the authority.”

“Then what good are you to us?” A mistake, snapping quite so sharply — it pleased the crowd, but cost Festus his tenuous grip on the rasp in his voice. A cough seized him with some violence, and Stattenholme took the opportunity, of course he did —

“Are you well, Land’s Own?”

 _Breathe. Patience._ “A small thing, Your Grace. Winter.” Festus inclined his head in Cullough’s direction. “A busy season for a Land’s Own, as Fro Cullough reminds us.”

Cullough had the flimsy decency to flush. Stattenholme only narrowed his eyes a fraction further. “To this effect, I will remind you of the purpose of this session.”

“To have some questions answered, yes.” He turned to the ambassador again. “What is it, then, fro? You have no answers, you have no authority — why are you here, except to mock us to our faces?”

“Land’s Own.” Now Stattenholme’s voice rang like an edge unsheathed. “This is a testimony, not a rally.”

Even under the eyes of the parliamentary guards, the crowd was beginning to shift and mutter. Cullough now teetered openly on the edge of either panic or outrage. “You put words in my mouth — this is unworthy — I am a messenger of goodwill. Adalas wishes for nothing more than a peaceful understanding — ”

“Adalas wishes! Well, messer, Hyem wishes for _justice._ Would you give us —”

“Fro Detrich, I warn you —”

“ — that which you deny us daily on the border, and rub in our faces at every opportunity —”

“You will force me to —”

“ — upon our own soil, in our own house —”

“ _Enough_.”

Stattenholme did not shout. Never that. But the guard snapped to attention. A low rumble rose from the benches. And the audience. And the web. “Fro Detrich, that is enough. You overstep outrageously. You are dismissed.”

The rumble began to build to a roar. Festus’s heart hammered in his eyes. “You speak for the House?”

“By my very title. Stand down.”

“The ambassador wished me to speak.”

“And I wish you to be silent. Stand down or I will have you removed!”

The benches erupted. Cries everywhere, protest from the Lower House, triumph from the Upper, open recriminations, _won’t stand_ and _how dare_ . The crowd took their cue like thunder after lightning, while the guards stood paralyzed with that ghastly prospect, pulling a Land’s Own Guardian bodily off the dais. That dais was now the centre of a furious whirlwind, and on it, Festus stood frozen to the core with the knowledge: _Sun’s grace, he’ll do it._

And he would have every right. He _had_ every right. _What did you think would happen, Detrich? When will you learn?_ Stattenholme wanted him silenced, and silenced he would be. 

That was power. And that was all.

The ruction in the hall was in full swing. Men were shouting from the balcony, even between the guards looming over them, and in the benches half the Lower House were pounding on the arms of their chairs. “A vote!” someone called out, and another, “Give us a vote! Let the Land’s Own speak!” A third stood up to hiss at the Upper House’s side: “Will no one co-sponsor? Forty-one of you signed Freiherr Kopfler’s petition. Where are you now?”

Some of the noblemen shifted in their seats, but not one spoke up, much less made to rise; a part of Festus realized he’d expected as much. All of a sudden he was so tired he was almost dizzy. Stattenholme’s voice sounded, very calm. “I fear that you will find things changed, fro. That coalition no longer stands. Certain irregularities in their conduct have been found out.” He wasn’t speaking to Festus. He didn’t need to. _He knows everything_ . Kopfler’s bargain, and the bargains that had come of it, and Sun only knew what more. _He had you from the start_.

He had one play. Kopfler was still nowhere to be seen, and so much for his signatories. But one man remained. He looked across the hall, to the back, and to the section of the hall that sat invited guests. To Aberhern.

Stattenholme’s gaze, of course, followed.

“Professor.” The Duke’s voice rose easily over the hubbub. “The House seeks legal counsel. Are there grounds for a challenge to the Speaker’s decision?”

Aberhern stood up, leaning on his cane. Even from across the hall, Festus could see his old teacher’s pallor. “A co-sponsor of the Upper House is required, as Your Grace knows, to call a vote on reinstating the Land’s Own Guardian’s speaking privilege.”

“And in the absence of a co-sponsor?”

“The Kaiser’s invitation, of course. But no other grounds.”

“Are there legal grounds for removal?”

“Of — of the Land’s Own? From Parliament?”

“That is my question, Professor.”

Aberhern’s throat bobbed once. He began to look to Festus. And stopped.

“Given the breach of protocol we have witnessed,” he said, flat and mechanical, “yes. That is a legal course.”

A fresh swell of voices, furious and exultant and demanding and dismissing, rose up from every corner. But Festus heard barely any of it. His body felt physically emptied of air. He stared at Aberhern, who would not look at him. 

Dimly he was aware that two guards were making their tentative, almost creeping way toward him, up from the benches.

He could not drop his eyes and go in peace and shame. Festus glanced up — the people were still watching. For them, he would hold his unbearably heavy head straight on his soldier’s back, and nod once at Cullough, as though at an equal, before departing. It was worth something. Beyond that, there was nothing left for him to do but leave, walking out as though through a thick and sapping mist. He left through a backdoor, out into an empty drawing room, and stopped before the outer doors. Outside, the waiting crowd would surround him. Embrace him. Warm him. But he would have nothing to offer them. Not even war.

There he was still standing, at last letting his shoulders slump, thinking, thinking, thinking, when the doors creaked ajar. In slipped, of all people, the student who had jumped up to try and catch his gaze earlier. She looked harried and dishevelled, and behind her he could just catch the mutter of the guard who had let her through, _But hurry or I’ll drag you out by your —_

The student shut the door on him, and spoke up in the same breath. “Fro Detrich, listen, it’s about Freiherr Kopfler —”

* * *

“ — just as you said. Creeping out of Stattenholme’s carriage in the dead of night, Sun only knows what else he was doing in there.” Sofia made a face that hinted at some ideas. The students all around her laughed, the sound carrying in the mansion’s gutted hall.

Saul didn’t join in, but it was good to know. Sofia’s and Yunas’s band had done exactly as they were told — shaping up well altogether. He turned his attention back to Yunas, who was sweating before him, though he needed only a fraction of said attention to block the other man’s next inexpert swing. Yunas did have the most obvious potential of all his friends, if he could just stop overreaching like he had some stupid notion that he _ought_ to be better than Saul already.

“Watch your feet.”

“I’m _trying —_ ”

“Trying won’t stop you getting gutted. Do it right.”

“Is it true what Sofia said last week, Yunas?” another student chimed in, breathless in the midst of his own drill. “About the guns?”

Saul walked over to kick at the young man’s knees, sending him scrambling to correct his posture. “You barely know your cock’s business end, and you want a gun?”

The student chuckled ruefully, but Sofia scowled and tossed her head. “It’ll come to guns sooner or later, the way things are happening. Have you seen the guardsmen lurking outside our beer hall now?” Some murmurs of dismay rose to answer her, the others stopping in their drills to gather closer round. Saul stood back, listening to the way they built themselves up —

“The testimony today might change things.”

“It’s only one more of Stattenholme’s tricks.”

“It’s all just tricks in Parliament. Even the Lower House is only worth a damn because Fro Detrich has them in hand.”

“Not while we’re all too young to vote…”

“— can only trust ourselves.”

“— make a stand —

“Yes, but… guns? It’s Adalans I want to shoot, not good Hyemi, even if they are rich.”

“Is there such a thing as a good rich man?”

“Well,” Yunas said with a laugh that all of them joined in on. It was a trick he had, Yunas, Saul had come to learn. Sofia in her fury sounded righteous, and they all listened to her, wanting to be righteous; but they listened to Yunas more, because he told them they were righteous already. “Yes, yes, I know. But listen, we can’t yet know what might be needed of us. We said we’d be ready to stand besides Fro Detrich, didn’t we? Whatever he asks.”

This got quick and unified assent, though the group continued on to quietly reminisce about the early days of the revolution, the weeks of uncertainty and misinformation in the capitol, seesawing elation and dread. As Yunas began to speak of what little fighting he’d witnessed himself, still ensconced and ignorant in his father’s estate, Sofia took Saul’s arm and pulled him aside.

She spoke quietly, well under the other voices. “You’ve been to Stattenholme’s mansion, haven’t you?”

The question surprised him. He didn’t quite think before answering. “A few times.”

“Can you tell me what it’s like inside?”

Something in her look made him narrow his eyes. She wasn’t asking after the Duchess’s flower arrangements. “Why?”

“We have reasons.” Her nostrils flared in a twitch of banked defiance under his searching gaze. “We know you have rules you abide by. Just tell me, we ask for nothing more.”

Saul looked up from her face, over her head to the little group crowded around Yunas. They were coming along nicely, but real fighting men would chop them like mincemeat. “If you’re going to —”

“We aren’t stupid,” Sofia snapped. “A plan needs information first of all.” And that confirmed it. _They’re going after the Duke_. 

Detrich had refused him the chance to kill the man. _I won’t see such a thing done in Hyem,_ he’d said. But Sofia was Hyemi. Her friends, all of them, the very people of that civilized country. _The revolution is over,_ Detrich had said. But Stattenholme _was_ his enemy. Sofia and Yunas had said, _When he needs us_.

He thought of Detrich slumped over his desk, pulled under by utter exhaustion. He wouldn’t let Saul fight. _But I am his soldier._

Sofia’s eyes were still on him, as sharp as any fighting man’s steel. He pulled her a touch closer to speak in her ear: “Listen carefully —”

* * *

“Ah, Festus! Good news about Kirschen’s retu— _hngh!_ ”

The surge of soul-power that pinned Kopfler in place made his spine arch back and his legs spasm, raising his body up on tiptoe, almost off the ground. His eyes were bloodshot all over when Festus looked right into them and ground out, “ _Why_?”

“I — hahh — I don’t unders—”

“Are you trying to _lie_ to me, damn you?! How much of it was a trap? The deal — did you mean to ferret these men out for Stattenholme from the beginning? When you called me to deal with Geitenholme —” It came to Festus as he looked back, a dozen details in the clarity of hindsight. Geitenholme’s uncannily pointed insults. “Did Stattenholme plan all of it? The testimony? Aberhern? _Why,_ Max?”

“Didn’t think — could stop you —”

“So you thought, what’s the harm? What more did you want I didn’t give you?!”

“Insurance — collateral —” Kopfler wheezed and writhed. “I’m a businessman — !”

Festus yanked his power back. Kopfler fell like a sack of bones.

His form on the floor was pitiful. Festus didn’t look. It had taken no great pull on the web to pin the man, and still it had left him with a pounding, nauseous headache. _How long? How many steps ahead? How could you still have thought you could match them at their game?_ The drawing room swam before his eyes. He shut them tightly, jammed the heel of his hand into one; when he opened them again, he was face to face with Professor Aberhern.

He must have followed behind Kopfler coming in, though Festus didn’t know when he’d left the main hall — Sun only knew what was happening in the main hall now. Fifteen years later, his old teacher’s eyes could still cleave through him. Dignity, keen confidence, gentle wisdom — all that Festus’s life had once hinged on. _But it wasn’t a life. Just a dream_. Aberhen looked disappointed. A strange, detached disappointment, almost like grief.

Festus couldn’t have it of him. He hissed between his teeth, “Did Stattenholme bring you, too?”

Aberhern took a long look at Kopfler, his other once-student, still shivering on the ground; he sighed. “I knew only what Max had told me — that things might escalate.”

“Escalate!”

“I had hoped not to be forced into this position.”

“But you knew, if you would be —”

“It was quite clear-cut, really, Festus. You know the law.” He looked up at last, shook his head. “You were a brilliant student.”

Festus thought he might laugh, then thought he might cry. “The law serves the lawmaker.”

“The law protects the powerless.”

“Is Duke Stattenholme powerless?!”

“After the revolution?” The old professor clicked his tongue. “Where there is no power but steel, a duke is only a man.”

“That is the point!”

“Spoken like a foot-soldier’s son.” Very slowly, his old knees stiff, Aberhern knelt down next to Kopfler. Put his hand on the trembling man’s shoulder. “We had hopes for you, you know, Festus. Great hopes. Such a bright mind, from such base blood… how we hoped that the brightness would overcome. More than seeing what you do to my country, it grieves me to see the taint triumphant in you. When you chose the army over your studies —”

“Chose — I was destitute, drowning in debt, I worked and starved for months — I begged — !”

“The world lends its help to the deserving man,” Aberhern said, with simplest, deepest conviction. He began to help Kopfler sit up. “I had hopes even then. Even through the revolution. But this… do not do this and call me your teacher.”

There was finality in the admonition, and there was something else. From fifteen years’ distance, Festus recognized it. It set the old voice in his mind crowing. _He wants you to bow your head and ask forgiveness._

The nausea nearly overwhelmed him. Part of it was the web, too, the throb of emotion in the air like the sickly weight of a storm about to break. The street outside the doors. The packed hall. The quarrelling Lower and Upper Houses. The pulsing press of rage veined with anxiety, twitching indecisiveness, fear that sat stony and tangible in the belly. Crowding against the chokehold of his own helplessness, it was too much. Stattenholme had undone every grip he had, every step painfully taken. _No one believes you can be patient. How much strength do you think you have?_

Shoving stiff fingers against his eyes, he wavered half a step back from Aberhern and Kopfler. Their gazes were both on him. For a moment, all he wanted in the world was to sit down.

He still had the people, his head of steam. Even with Kirschen away, Basholme gone, and Kopfler a traitor, with the Upper House turned and him left with the ashes. Any moment now he’d go out to them. But when he stepped back again and his back found the cold hardness of the wall, he did not stop himself leaning against it. _Just for a moment. Just for a moment._ And yet he let the moment stretch out.

* * *

_So this is snow._

The clouds must have started their gentle overwhelming of the world when Saul had still been inside with the students; now the storm was well underway, muffling the city in bluish white and suffusing it with a fine misting glow. The softness of the flakes surprised him. Yunas and Sofia and their band had all hurried to depart at the sight of the sky tall with swirling motes of gossamer, some cursing, some laughing, all knowing their clearest, driest ways home. But Saul lingered to watch the snow over the river, to hold out his hands, tilt up his face to the minute touches of almost-nothing on his skin that became, even as he watched, a hushed and relentless blanket down upon the earth.

 _I’d never have seen this in Ilyiga_ . He had tried to comfort himself with this thought, not long ago. And it _was_ beautiful, that hazy, dreaming glow. But the millpond was not the ocean; this light was not the sun.

The flurry grew thicker as he picked his way home across slippery pavements, through a city emptied of all those who had anywhere at all else to go. He shoved his hands deeper and deeper into his pockets and thought of Sofia’s questions. Going after Stattenholme, of that he was certain; less, that she and hers stood any kind of chance. _Vestgaard’s men will chop them up — like butchering a chicken._ No work for a soldier, but Vestgaard was a mercenary and the Duke’s lapdog. Either way, it was not his business. Detrich had forbidden him to fight.

They might all die, to a man, while he was home safe. Briefly he wondered if Detrich would find fault in him for that. But Detrich knew how war was. _And that’s a worthy end, surely._

The snow had become a veil as thick as a milky fog, with wind at last putting a sting into its dance, then a bite. Saul pulled his scarf up and his hat down and set his jaw, but found little in the exercise but rising misery. One of his boots began to squelch, his nose to run, and his breath to stutter through teeth he just held back from chattering. _Damned Hyem_ . Come to the capitol, Detrich had said. Here is nice food, here are lovely clothes. _I should stab him for not warning me._

He came into a house wrapped in a strange quiet, only the clocks ticking in every room, themselves faintly muffled along with the rest of the world. They sang their hour quietly to themselves. Saul had peeled off his coat, jacket, and socks, had dried his feet and was halfway through drying his hair when it occurred to him that no one had called his name nor berated him for dragging icy mud in. Was Detrich still in Parliament?

He came back downstairs. The office was locked, but the kitchen door stood open.

Detrich sat at the table, eyes half-lidded as he stared into the steaming mug he held. He looked tired and unwell, all shut doors and distance, the steam almost blurring his face. He looked like he saw nothing but the black fog that shrouded him as the snow shrouded his city.

But he looked up to see Saul, and at the sight of him frowned minutely in a look like disapproval, but laced with something softer and more personal.

“You look cold, lad.”

“It’s snowing.” Saul stepped in to pull up a chair and sit beside him. He wiped a sleeve under his nose and eyed the mug and its steam sidelong. “I think I hate snow.”

“Mm.” That was all, for a moment. And then: “I can’t rightly blame you. When I first came to this city…” Detrich paused, then gave his head a minute shake, as though not quite meaning the gesture and the hesitation it revealed. “The great Northerner poets have all written odes to it. Southerners call them mad.”

“All your country is mad.”

Detrich’s eyes unfocused again. He looked down, at his own hands about the mug, on the table. “Yes,” he said softly. “But it is my country.”

Saul could not answer that. The thought of the sun was in his mind again, hot and crowding in his throat. Detrich’s gaze shifted back to him once more with that odd look, seeing perhaps too much. Saul wanted none of it. He asked, “How did it go with the testimony?”

“Not according to any plan.”

“Was it Stattenholme?”

“Should’ve seen it coming, really.”

“So what happened?”

Detrich’s brows knotted. He opened his mouth, drew in a breath to speak as though feeding an ember of anger trying to flare into life.

Then he stopped; and to Saul’s confusion, shook his head, and slid the mug over to him instead.

“Never you mind it,” he said, hoarse and soft. “Have a drink instead. You need this more than me.”

Saul blinked, and blinked again, caught utterly off his guard. He glanced down. He thought the drink was tea, but it was thicker, an opaque velvet brown. Then he thought it was coffee, but the aroma was creamy-sweet. He raised the mug carefully for a stunning noseful of that steam.

The drink’s first touch to the tip of his tongue was like seeing a whole new colour. He pulled in a gulp before he could help himself. “What _is_ this?”

“Hot chocolate.” Something had shifted in the weariness on Detrich’s face, watching his ward drink. Not lessened, but underscored differently: lines of stress to the faint suggestion of smiling lines. “Mia has a little pack she got from an admirer once.” The hint of a smile turned wry. “I wanted whiskey, but I suppose she has more sense than me.”

Saul had never had whiskey, and couldn’t speak to that. But he took another sip, this one slow, lingering, relishing the richness of the drink and its layers and layers of flavour. _I’d never have had this in Ilyiga._ He couldn’t rightly say if it was a comfort; but his always-gnawing stomach felt warm.

One more sip, and he set the mug down, ready to slide it back across the table, only to come up short when Detrich shook his head. The Land’s Own waved a hand. _Have it all._

Saul stared again. He frowned at Detrich in open uncertainty, only to receive an unimpressed look in turn. No words needed there: _You mean it? a_ nd, in response, _What have I ever told you that I didn’t mean?_

The mug was still two-thirds full, perhaps more. He raised it back to his lips and drank, feeling the warmth spread. And feeling Detrich’s gaze on him as he did — focused, and deep, and satisfied.

“Good,” Detrich said, in a tone that turned the idle comment to praise. He leaned an elbow on the table, rubbed his eyes, muttered low: “Go on, lad. Drink up. Make one thing at least right in this world.”


	15. Things Fall Apart

The clocks were striking an hour before midnight when Festus shot up in bed with a gasping cry. At first he thought it was a bolt of thunder that had wakened him. But no, he knew in the next instant. It was the web. The churning, screaming web. Something was wrong.  _ Everything  _ was wrong.

His breathing wouldn’t steady. He threw the covers aside. His heart leaped with a broken rhythm inside his chest. The web lurched in his head and veins. Fury. Red-white inflaming the weave in every direction. Choked terror inside that rage. A crowd whipping itself into a frenzy. He sucked in air and tried, like a wounded soldier patting down his own body, to find the source of the flaring pain.  _ The city. Right here in the city. _ Not a mile outside his own home. _ What’s happening?  _ Half the Guardians in the capitol were in his mind already in a blaze of desperate cries. He couldn’t make sense of the tangle of their panic. Only a direction.  _ Go. Go now! _

He’d fallen into bed wearing the dress uniform he’d gone to Parliament in. It was rumpled in every possible way, but Festus barely stopped to snatch up his hat and greatcoat. Outside, the snow had yielded to a ferocious downpour whipped by wind. Not two hundred yards down the main street, which he covered in a frantic half-run on slick pavement, Alsie Baier was already waiting for him. The Merchants’ Guardian’s face was the colour of the piled snow.

“Land’s Own — it’s mad, they’ve gone mad!”

Festus slowed to a brisk walk but didn’t stop, though his chest felt thick and a wrenching cough threatened just in the back of his throat. He snapped off as Alsie kept pace, “What’s happening?”

“Students — a group of them gathered on the street outside Duke Stattenholme’s mansion. They kept trickling in until there were maybe a hundred. Now a whole mob’s gathered — eight hundred, a thousand, I don’t know — they’re shouting at the Duke to bring the ambassador out!”

His feet never stopped, but Festus’s heart nearly did. A mob.  _ A riot _ . They wanted to tear Cullough limb from limb.  _ Sun’s grace, no, no — not yet! _

They were close enough to hear the throng now, the roaring of countless voices over the thundering of the sky. The gas lamps of the wealthy quarter threw into relief the faces of the solitary curious hanging back with hypnotized horror. Up ahead, Festus could already see the crowd thicken. How many people might be there, he couldn’t guess, couldn’t count the souls in a mass of roiling light.

“Has the Duke sent his guards out?”

“I couldn’t see — but those students, I don’t think they care.”

“Who’s closest to the front?”

“Mattias, maybe? Or Agneté, her spirit for sure —”

Pulling hard to a stop, Festus closed his eyes, pushed his mind and will, past the pounding of rain on his head and back. Past the chill that numbed his hands and feet and face and threatened to break him into helpless shivers. He caught the bright thread of his Guardian’s soul, clear in every chaos, and poured his own sight through to Agneté’s eyes, and through her eyes to those of the great eagle of soul-stuff that soared above the city by her power. From its vantage he could see the crowd in its entirety, hundreds and hundreds packed before the mansion’s gate. The Stattenholme guards visible at their stations, armed and ready but seemingly no deterrent. Agneté’s eagle gave her sight only, not hearing, but he could already make out some of the cries.  _ Down with Stattenholme!  _ and  _ Down with the inquiry!  _ and  _ Give us revenge! _

Too much, too soon. His head of steam, boiling over. One thing to have Cullough thrown in disgrace back across the border, as the testimony had been meant to achieve.  _ Stattenholme’s misstep. Now he got this instead.  _ It was a cold comfort. Festus pulled his vision back from Agneté’s, his mind back to his own body, trembling and creaking with weariness. There was no war in winter. And if the people could not have war they would have Cullough.

And if Cullough would not be handed over, they would have Duke Stattenholme and his mansion and any living soul within. And if the violence started again —

* * *

“Saul! Wake up!  _ Wake up! _ ”

The clock showed forty-five minutes to midnight when Saul startled awake to a pounding at his door, grabbing for a weapon that wasn’t there. It took him another moment to realize it was Mia shouting. A jingle of keys came, and his locked door swung open. The housekeeper burst in like cannonfire, soaked to the bone even in her cloak, rushing at him with eyes wild.

“You have to stop them, you have to — where’s Fro Detrich? Where did he go?! I have to stop them, help me —”

Her open panic made him leap up to his feet at once. Mia was many irksome things, but easily rattled was not one of them. As soon as the covers slipped off Saul’s shoulders the night chill sank ten thousand teeth into his skin, but his heart was already racing, pumping hot blood through all his limbs. “What happened? Stop who?”

“Sofia and Yunas!” She all but came at him, grabbing for his arms. He caught her wrist but she was too frantic to flinch. “Sofia’s in the street, there’s a mob about Stattenholme’s mansion — Yunas is going to break in!”

_ A mob? _ That was new, but made sense. He’d seen Yunas rouse his fellow students to action around the print shop his father had come to close down. He nodded at Mia’s stricken face. “He’s going after Stattenholme.”

“You  _ knew?! _ ”

“Sofia asked me about the mansion —”

“What were you  _ thinking!” _ And now she did launch herself at him, fists swinging to hammer at his chest. Saul caught her other wrist, held her arms immobile, and her whole body shook instead. “You fool, you incredible, horrible fool! A street riot — if they kill the Duke —”

“Stattenholme needs to die.” It had been obvious, the obvious answer that Detrich couldn’t pursue himself, not while he had to fight with words and not guns. So obvious that Saul didn’t know why Mia was panicking. Didn’t know why her panic was creeping into him, under his skin, hardening in his belly, scrabbling in his throat. “His own people want him dead. It’s an execution.”

“An execution is by law!”

“You Hyemi and your law!”

“Yes, we Hyemi!” she snarled in his face. “We ended the revolution. This will be civil war!”

Saul froze. He’d heard these words before. Mia had said them. The people in the market had said them. Detrich had said them, so many times.

The hand of horror squeezing around his heart plunged in with icy talons.  _ I’ve made a terrible mistake. _

The realization was so sudden, so deep that he felt hurled into it as though into physical abyss, fathomless suffocating water. He couldn’t get air in. For a moment he stood stupefied. _ But it was so obvious _ . Sun’s blood, how many times had Detrich told him to  _ listen? _

He shoved Mia aside, and practically forgot her as he yanked on his jacket, his coat, his boots.  _ I have to go _ . He had to find Detrich. No, he had to find  _ Yunas _ . Find him and stop him — he had to do it himself.  _ I said I wouldn’t betray him.  _ Mia watched him, trembling and ashen, as he patted down the side of his body, then remembered. “Do you have the office keys?”

“Yes — what for?”

“I need a weapon.”

He expected an argument, one he couldn’t afford right now, he didn’t have time to  _ convince _ her — but Mia moved at once. It was she who opened a desk drawer for him and offered him a dagger — the very dagger he had, a lifetime ago, held to Detrich’s throat.

It was a tight and uncomfortable fit in his Hyemi boot, but Saul took it. The steel should have sang against his body, steel at last, but it was heavy instead, and cold.

“Stattenholme’s mansion?” he asked.

“Yes — Sofia said there was a servants’ entrance near the carriage house —”

_ I told her about that one.  _ “I’ll stop him. I’ll fix this.”

Mia only looked at him, the strangest look of hope.

That didn’t matter. This duty was not for her sake, or her country’s promise. It was his and for himself alone, the man Detrich looked at him and saw. He patted his boot over the dagger one last time and went out into the winter dark.

* * *

In the thickness of the mob, it should have been easy for Festus to mask himself inside the web, to be one more face in the crowd. Should have been. Sending out that subtle signal amid the maelstrom of soul-power around him, arcing between bodies like sparks of lightning, made for a dizzying split of his attention. Every now and then he was overcome enough to have to grab for Alsie Baier’s arm beside him and brace himself. But he pushed through. Had to get to the front, the students, the line of confrontation. Then he would make himself seen and —  _ Sun’s mercy, what then? _

The cries were clear around him, screaming harshly but in harmony.  _ Bring the dog out! _ His people around him. They would tear Cullough to pieces, as they had torn their oppressors apart bodily before, and Stattenholme too, and his wife and his infant daughter if they could get their hands on them. And they would not thank Festus for stopping them. 

Even if the mob were only a fraction of the city, which was a fraction of the nation. He was the Land’s Own Guardian, and he knew the will of the people.

_ And you have never truly believed that one revolution was enough. _

There was a ripple of force through the crowd, and a man slammed hard into his side. Quite by accident, and was immediately swallowed back into the press, but Festus staggered and leaned his hands on his knees to ride out a coughing fit. It pulled his attention from the voice in his mind.  _ No. This is my head of steam. I guard this land _ . And that meant war, but  _ his _ war, planned and directed and serving a known, sure cause. Not this blind convulsion of violence… He pulled himself straight, nodded at Alsie still by his side. He couldn’t hear her worried question in the din of noise. To the precarious balance of his contact with the web, he added a call to his Guardians — a dozen in the crowd, like beacons blazing.  _ See me know me trust me.  _ How he needed now to be trusted.

He felt them converge on him as he pushed through the last lines, shedding the concealment as he went, as they joined him. Now people began to notice his presence, and the agitation was climbing murmur by shout. Their faces turned to him. Their energy.  _ The Land’s Own is here! _ and  _ Fro Detrich, stand with us!  _ And if he could hold them —

He broke through to the front line, and his heart sank.

“Sofia.”

Marten Furst’s daughter smiled brilliantly at him. “Fro Detrich! Oh, you look dreadful — don’t worry, we’re here to end this farce.”

She had been shouting in the face of one of his Guardians:  _ Who do you serve, frowe? Who set you to stand against the people?!  _ Two dozen young men and women were behind her, powder to the match of her rage. She was magnificent. He looked at her and felt sick.

“Oh, lass, who put you up to this?”

“‘Put’ — no one!” She bristled at the suggestion. A wave of her arm indicated her comrades, all pushing forward, adding their shouts. “This had to happen, Sun knows it! How long has he mocked us to our faces, he and his Adalan friend! If they won’t give us justice in Parliament, we’ll take it right here in the street!”

They would, he thought. And didn’t they have every right?  _ Who are you to say when it has to be over? _ Expectation smouldered all around him, now ready for his order of fire.  _ You said the streets belong to you. But really it’s you who belong to them. _

He couldn’t so much as clear his clogged throat. The core of the mob was quieting to hear the exchange. Every word from his mouth, every sound, was life and death.

“Listen to me, Frowe Furst.” He spoke low and urgent, to her and to all her band through her. To call her  _ lass  _ had been a mistake. She was her father’s daughter, yes, and her father was a Guardian. “All of you. This will not achieve the aim you wish. What do you hope to get from Cullough’s death?”

They looked baffled behind their fury. “Revenge!” one youth shouted.

“Revenge? Or justice? One fool of a royal relative will not give you justice. Adalas sent him to us because he has no value. Kill him, and he’d be no more than Stattenholme’s sacrifice. The Duke will claim that the scales are even and the matter is closed.”

The wildfire blazed and flickered in Sofia’s eyes. He could see her comrades struggle to wrest reason from the mighty, sucking current of their rage. “It boils down to Stattenholme,” one of them snarled. “Stattenholme needs to die.”

_ Is he wrong?  _ Festus opened his mouth, but someone spoke over him.

“Right! Cullough  _ and _ Stattenholme!”

“Send their bloody hearts to Adalas together!”

“Land’s Own,” Sofia’s voice rose again. “Give us the sign. Let us send this message in your name. Let us tell them it’s to be war!”

The roar of approval rose from the students and drummed through the crowd. Abruptly Festus was aware of the presence of his Guardians about him, at his back — a whole new kind of awareness. They too were watching. The guards about Stattenholme’s mansion were watching. From the windows of the mansions and townhouses all about them, the folk of the rich quarter were watching. The Kaiser would see the mob from his own window, if he had the bare courage to look.

Nine million souls in the web. Their weight was beyond imagining. And he was so tired.

Amid the many shouts of fury, carried from afar, a sudden shout of alarm — and something in the wind outside the crowd shifted. A counterflow, from the edges of the mob and rushing in. Gazes turned around again. Unclear at first, a general tone of warning, and then the first unmistakable cry of  _ Soldiers coming! _ and an icy wave of fear all through the web in its wake.

Not all of these people had fought in the revolution. And not all who had, had fought on his own side. But that lance of terror, Festus knew. Dragging air into a chest that would not make room for it, he reached out to find and feel the rush of new presences. Soldiers, yes, some one hundred men, anxious but too well-trained to feel more than a glimmer of it. And when he felt for their commander —

A bright and steady thread, certain and clear and gloriously familiar. He would always know this soul.  _ Ander. Ander is back _ . And if Ander Kirschen were here to stand with him, then this could be salvaged, anything could be —

“People of the capitol!” A man’s voice came bellowing. Kirschen’s aide-de-camp.  _ Wait, why —  _ “By the order of General Ander Kirschen, this assemblage is to be dispersed!” 

* * *

The pavement was treacherously slick under Saul’s boots. The steaming of his breath in the frozen air was as thick as gunsmoke. He had no time for either concern. He ran.

He knew the way. That was the one comfort. The distance to Stattenholme’s mansion, three quarters of a mile if that, he covered without once missing a turn. He knew where the servants’ entrance was. Mia had mentioned a riot, but the street and pathway outside this gate were clear. Kept that way as part of Yunas’s plan, maybe. That, Saul didn’t know. Really, he didn’t know anything. He didn’t have a plan. He just had a knife.

_ I’m going to kill him _ . It didn’t feel nearly as sure an answer as it always had before.

Scaling the gate was nothing. His boots gave a great splash in the mud on the other side, but no one challenged him. The little guardhouse beside the carriage-house was dark. He could clearly hear the roar of Sofia’s mob outside, but within the mansion’s walled garden there was only the hammering of the rain on wet soil and the rustling hedges snatched at by the wind. A dozen windows were lit in the house, pale in the night like bloodless faces, and the quiet was a quiet of banked terror and a hope beyond hope of being passed by.

Up ahead, between one snow-silvered thicket and another, he heard it: the patter of footsteps, the hiss of an exhale.

“Yunas.” Why he spoke up, drawing out the two syllables, he might never know. His own steps on the snow were careful, too aware of the slippery wetness, the crunch of patchwork ice. Not home ground. “We need to talk.”

A rattle, then. Metal. A lock being picked. And a murmur. Yunas, in answer, but really to himself, “No, we don’t.”

Saul darted forward. He would have jumped over or torn through the hedges in better light and weather; in the murk, underscored candle-yellow and snowfall-blue, he reached the door only to find it already shut again. Yunas had shoved something under the handle on the other side. Breaking through took a few kicks, each thumping dully through the yard.  _ The guards will come _ . They had to, sooner or later. He ought to have raised the alarm already, that would have been simple — but then he’d have had to explain to them how he knew what he knew. It didn’t matter.  _ This is on me _ .

Discipline. Patience. And one more solid kick to the door.

The brightness of the hall almost blinded him after the dark without. He bent his knees and threw up his hand by instinct, knife flashing, but no one was on the other side. Just the corridor, a thick blue rug and the Duchess Stattenholme’s flower arrangements. The sound of many fires flickering. Some servant’s frantic prayers behind one door. The dense air of death threatening around every turn — even an utter novice could do a veteran great damage with surprise on his side. And Yunas — he thought back to the meeting just hours before, and knew with absolute certainty that Yunas had a gun.

Muddy bootprints led him to the main hall and the curving staircases, but vanished on the marble. One wing led to the Duke’s office, the other to his bedchamber, and of course Yunas knew where both were.

There was no choice but to choose. He crept into the family wing inch by inch. Here the mob’s roaring rattled the windows, an endless echo throughout the silent house.  _ Where is everyone?  _ Were the guards all busy at the main gate? Something was wrong, something was —

“Da-  _ blast _ it, Vestgaard, I cannot return to tell my queen I cowered all night from some rabble in a nursery!”

Cullough’s voice came so sudden, and so shrill with upset, that Saul nearly turned and stabbed the door it sounded from behind. All stifled, shivering pants, he pressed himself to the wall instead, listening intently. It was not Vestgaard’s growl that answered, but Anké’s voice, soft and not:

“My lord, I can only plead again with your good sense. This is for my husband’s protection as much as your own.“

“Half the household guard is with your husband! Anké, my dear, think of my own wife’s respect for me.  _ Tell  _ this Lansikaan brute —”

_ Half the household guard?  _ Saul’s racing heart slowed down perhaps half a beat’s worth. Yunas might shoot a guard or two with good luck, but after that he was as good as a straw target.  _ Maybe I’ve come for nothing.  _ Really, what had he been so afraid for —

He scrambled just out of sight as the door creaked open.

Vestgaard stuck his head out with a sniff and a rumble like a hunting dog’s, looked this way and that. From within came Anké’s low choke and Cullough’s eager “Well?!” The Lansikaan waited another moment — a slow one, as though relishing his charge’s frustration — then made a vague sound in his mouth and glanced back inside.

“Come on then, my lord.”

Cullough came rushing out, as careless as he was eager.  _ What an incredible fool _ . But that was Vestgaard’s problem, nothing Saul had any concern with. He had one need only and that was to see Vestgaard at Stattenholme’s side, and know Yunas was — whatever would become of Yunas when the Duke’s protectors had him in hand.  _ His father is Stattenholme’s man _ . He wondered at it as he crept down the corridor, just enough to keep the two men in his sight. How much worth was Yorgen Geitenholme’s heir?

They came to the top of the curving stairs. Cullough, not even looking at Vestgaard a step behind him, charged confidently ahead to the opposite wing of the house.

Vestgaard did not.

Saul’s surprise was such that it almost slipped from his mouth in a disastrous noise. He watched the Lansikaan stop in place, stand still for a moment as though listening for Sun knew what, and then, quietly and deliberately, start down the stairs. In no time at all he was out of sight. Cullough was still marching down the corridor. Saul saw him reach the far corner, about to vanish around it.

Instead, he saw him scramble back with a cry.

“What — who are you — what is the meaning of — !”

And there around the same corner came Yunas, dark-eyed and bloody-minded, a gun at his hip and his own knife in hand, sucking in and puffing out the heady, terrified breaths of a boy about to make his first kill. He broke into a run behind Cullough as the ambassador hurtled back toward the nursery, shouting “Help!” and “Vestgaard!” and “Please!” From the nursery came a woman’s answering scream. But the house was silent. Vestgaard was not coming.

No one was coming.

Saul leapt out of hiding, tackled Yunas to the floor, and rolled right with him into the nursery.

It was the stupidest thing he’d done in his life and he knew it. It was some Sun-sent miracle that Yunas’s gun had not gone off, nor fired accidentally as Yunas’s clutching hand squeezed it for dear life. But it was a fight, Sun’s blood, it was a real fight, armed opponent and all, and his bones felt buoyant and his head was ringing. Yunas kicked out and caught his breastbone, a hard blow at such close quarters. Saul lost his grip and some of his air and scrambled backward, letting go, giving Yunas the room to drag himself up, and he didn’t care, he could go a while longer, he  _ wanted  _ to go —

Beyond his singing blood the room was full of whimpers. Cullough was cowering indeed, pressed into a corner. Anké’s maid was in a tight ball under a table. And the Duchess herself knelt right where her legs had failed her, at the very centre of the room, wrapped all about her sobbing infant daughter.

Yunas was catching his breath. He’d lost his blade, but had his gun, raised it in a wide gesture that made the three wretches behind him swallow another set of screams. “What are you doing?!”

“Stopping you.” For a moment he’d almost forgotten.

“Sun’s sake,  _ why _ ? You told me how to get in here! You  _ know _ Stattenholme has to die, you know he’s Fro Detrich’s enemy — and this Adalan scum!” He half-whirled on Cullough, taking his immediate attention off Saul. He had promise but nothing like a fighter’s instincts. Without a loaded gun he was a joke, and with it he was a threat to himself as much to anyone else.  _ What’s the use of killing him?  _ “I told Sofia, they  _ both _ need to go!”

Anké, her eyes tightly shut, spoke before Saul could. “Fro Geitenholme — Fro Geitenholme, please — the revolution is over, this is — this will be —”

Yunas snorted like a wild creature. “Civil war? Maybe it ought to! Maybe the revolution was over too soon. Even Fro Detrich knows it —”

Saul found his voice coming soft: “What do  _ you _ know about civil war, domé?”

And Yunas hesitated; a drawn-out hesitation, thin and fearful, before his hand tightened again about his gun. He did not raise it. But he said, “Stay out of the business of my country, exile.”

It was the last thing he said. The next instant, Saul’s dagger was lodged clean through his windpipe.

* * *

_ Not Ander. No. Ander would never betray me _ .

The mob had turned, all to a man. The sound of the soldiers’ boots on the icy pavement, the aide-de-camp’s announcement, and now the rattle of swords being loosened in their scabbards, all had turned them. None of them were shouting now. To a man, the rage of the people had curdled to a sick, suffusing silence.

The country was watching, but it was the students looking to him that Festus saw. Terror in their eyes. Not all — not Sofia, of course, Sofia was all alight. Eager and glad to be here again, in a throng of fury and fire so much like the barricades that had stood on every street not two years earlier — in the sights of the oppressor’s guns, to boot.  _ Ander? It isn’t possible _ . But Festus saw the rest. They looked to their Land’s Own Guardian, and they would follow the firebrand of the revolution, if he were that again.  _ Give us the sign _ , they had said. They would march against those guns for him. And they would say it had been what they wanted.

He began to push through the crowd.

They gave way, watching him all the while. Men and women, young and old, the poor who had gained — and here and there the rich who had lost, too, come to show their commitment to the new order.  _ To you _ . And he would give them war.  _ But what else have you ever had to give? _

The soldiers were lined up some twenty paces away from the edge of the crowd. Approaching them, Festus almost stumbled again, worse than he had at any point before. Now he stood alone and apart under the pelting rain, his exhaustion like frost creeping in the veins, like a grey fog released with every exhalation taking some last vestiges of clarity with it. He couldn’t recall his last proper night’s sleep. His chest burned with winter’s clawing. Land’s Own Guardian, firebrand of the revolution,  _ I’m only a man. I’m tired. I’m tired. _

The ranks parted. Ander Kirschen stepped forward. One pace. Two. Five. They met there in the middle of no man’s land.

“General.”

“Land’s Own.”

“What is the meaning of this?”

Kirschen’s eyes were miles beyond serene. Nothing showed in them at all, as though the man had turned to iron, to glass. “I was recalled to the capitol under imperial order, and informed upon my arrival that my duty was to protect the ambassador of Adalas.”

“Were you not aware of the circumstances here?”

“No, Fro Detrich,” Kirschen’s voice never softened. But his throat worked once. “Not until this very moment.”

It ripped through the fog, the understanding. The last of the puzzle pieces in place. _He didn’t know what he’d be coming back to_. And Kopfler’s interrupted news about Kirschen’s planned return. And the reason, the true reason for Cullough’s coming — proud, brainless Cullough, useless except to inflame a mob to want to gut him in the street. A mob that could be stopped — stopped by General Kirschen, the Land’s Own Guardian’s own right hand — with the Land’s Own Guardian’s own permission — turned against his own cause, surrendering at the time of greatest momentum, _my head of steam._ If he turned around now, with his people standing before the guns, and said, _Go home, there will be no revenge here…_

Or he could command Kirschen to stand down instead before the will of the people. Stand against his orders and his oath. Once again.  _ Ander, my heart’s own _ . At best he would destroy the man. At worst — at  _ likeliest _ — he would hand the Kaiser and the Upper House plain reason to gut every meagre power of the Land’s Own Guardian, and undo every victory of the revolution.

Unless the will of the people would not be undone, of course. In which case might as well charge the guns now.

He did not know what Kirschen saw in his face. He was unprepared when his lover took one more step forward, and was abruptly close enough to touch.

“I will do whatever you ask of me,” Kirschen murmured. “But you see it, do you not?”

“This is a trap.”

“I should not have been so hasty to take Max Kopfler’s offer.”

“Damn it, if I started counting  _ should not haves _ —”

“We have both been played.”

_ We don’t have to be _ . He could order the charge. He could give the sign. Let Stattenholme and his cronies, his friends and his peers, his dukes and grafs and freiherrs, his Kaiser and his law, all face the test of steel and blood. Let them play  _ his _ game. He was the Land’s Own Guardian. The will of the people.  _ Don’t I have every right? _

He closed his eyes and looked into the web. The endless spanning threads of bright power behind, around, within him. But it was not light he saw.

It was Saul’s face. Young and fine and wasted. The child of civil war.

Nothing he could do would chase the image away. No fire he could muster up, shivering and sick and weary beyond all thought, no fury.  _ Not this _ .

He opened his eyes and, with painstaking slowness, turned back to face the crowd.

“My brothers and sisters —” His ragged voice could not quite carry through the rain, but the silence of the people was absolute. “My brothers and sisters, I have asked you for many sacrifices. For the strength of the nation, we have never flinched. Tonight I must ask for a sacrifice like no other. Tonight I must ask you for patience.”

After that, the words came on their own. His conscious mind seemed to sink into the fog, slowly, like a dead leaf drifting down. They were the right words,  _ unity _ and  _ a land governed by law _ and  _ let not our enemies disdain us as savages _ . The web told him all he needed to know, all he needed to draw on to speak to them. Their fear. Their anxious doubt that they’d piled more and more fury upon, trying to bury it. Every mob at heart was a fearful thing. And if they would not thank him, he could at least be certain that they would listen.

He said what he had to.  _ We will not find our justice in the streets _ . And the pounding blood drained from the web. The rain washed away the ghost of gunsmoke.  _ We all know too well what waits for us down that path _ . Behind him he could feel the soldiers, too, losing tension. No bloodshed here tonight.

No bloodshed, no victory, not even revenge. Nothing but a head of steam dissipating, as the people watched their Land’s Own send them home. Not to wait for spring. Spring was too far away now. They had risen up and he, himself, had put them down. They would not rise again.

The revolution was over.  _ And so are your chances. _

* * *

_ I didn’t mean to _ . But by the time Saul thought that, Yunas was already dead.

Things happened in quick succession around him, after the initial shocking moment of bright red blood exploding across the blue rug. Anké shrieked, and as Yunas began to gurgle the maid shrieked as well and began to sob loudly and pray. Cullough repeated over and over, “Sun’s mercy, Sun’s mercy,” he looked up at Saul and croaked, “Please,” though Saul barely noticed him. Then Anké, tearful and trembling, pulled herself over to the ambassador and shook his shoulder and charged him to go find Vestgaard, go  _ now _ , and Cullough rallied himself and left the room, and after a little while came back with not only Vestgaard in tow but the Duke as well, and a number of guards, and there was dismay and outrage and a great deal of noise and Saul noticed very little of that either. Of course he’d meant to kill Yunas. He had come to kill Yunas. It was stupid to think anything else.

_ You are permitted no blade and no weapon _ . He’d taken Detrich’s own knife.  _ You fight when, if, and whomever I permit you to fight _ . And here he was.  _ You kill no one but by my explicit order.  _ And Yunas was dead.

His knees felt weak. Some sharp and spiralling ache twisted and twisted inside his heart. Even the lambent rage at that word,  _ exile _ , carved within his chest was gone.  _ What do I do?  _ He thought of the cold threshold of the Land’s Own’s house. The gate to the yard, shut in the dark.  _ Where do I go?  _ In ten years of fighting as a boy among grown men, ten years growing up on the battlefield, he had never felt so helplessly young.

Someone was standing before him. He blinked. It was Anké Stattenholme. The Duke was a step behind her. She was still cradling her daughter.

“You saved her,” she softly said. “Thank you.”

He found himself staring at her, swallowing hard, trying to parse the words.  _ I did save both of them _ . But he could not grasp the meaning that softened her voice. He could hardly understand that she was speaking to and of him.

His stare seemed to discomfit her, but she held his eyes, and at last something gentled in her gaze again. He could not quite tell what, but she stepped back and whispered to her husband, and he in turn gave a wordless glance to Vestgaard, and the Lansikaan at last came forth himself with Saul’s newly cleaned knife in hand. Vestgaard’s face lacked its usual twist of wry contempt to all about him. He handed the knife back to Saul, pommel-first.

“What a mess,” he said, a dry deadpan. “But a beautiful throw. Come on, mi domé, best if you stay here tonight.”

_ Here?  _ Saul’s mind turned, sluggish. Yunas was dead, and Stattenholme was safe, and he had no idea what came after. He needed to go back, of course, he needed to tell Mia. And she would tell Detrich. And Detrich would…  _ what?  _ The lack of an answer gaped, and he stared into its void, numb.

“Come on,” Vestgaard said again, with an urging gesture. Mutely, Saul took back the knife and followed.

* * *

Once, years ago at the height of the last border war, Festus had been stationed at a sea fort on the mouth of the Essine when an Adalan frigate had fired a cannonball clean through the wall of his room. It had passed close enough to singe his hair. The shot had gone through a number of walls before that, and had lost much of its momentum, and he had been a seasoned veteran by then of the harshness of war and life — but nothing could have prepared him for the thunder, the blaze, the shrieking rush of iron within a glance of leaving him nothing but wet dust. For hours afterward he’d sat trembling and twitching, frozen and numb, able to think only, over and over and over,  _ too close, too close _ .

It wasn’t unlike this, now. The crowd had scattered, drained away like so much rainwater. Roaring rage had turned to murmurs, to uneasy glances, to the bitterness of ash. Sofia Furst had left openly weeping, silent tears of disappointment as raw as grief. Even the soldiers were set to march away. But the seizing, paralyzing closeness of ruin remained.

“Thank you,” Kirschen said quietly in his ear, “for what you did not ask of me.”

They stood together some distance from the soldiers. Kirschen was warm and steady, as steady as he had ever, always been. But Festus turned his gaze away. The temptation to sag against his lover, to bury his face in Kirschen’s chest, was much too much.

The last vestiges of his focus stirred in warning. “You need to leave. We can’t be seen together.”

“Do you suppose anyone will be looking?”

“I know it.” Part of the play, perhaps. To keep them separate even while Kirschen was in the city. A brutal shiver hit him like a gale. They were coming in waves now, one after the other. The whole web was a rocking maelstrom. “I should be the last one here. I’ll go back after…”

Kirschen raised a hand to just brush against his temple. “Are you drawing warmth from the web?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Then you have a high fever.”

He’d known it already, really. The depths of his own weakness were no news.  _ It had all come to a head, and you blinked first.  _ “It’s been… winter.”

Kirschen’s eyes narrowed. “I cannot say I like leaving you alone in this state.”

“What state? This is — it’s not finished. I’m not finished.”  _ Not finished with what? You have no more momentum. You put it down yourself.  _ If the cost of justice was civil war…

Almost too late he felt himself swaying. Kirschen caught his arm.

“Festus,” he said, soft and urgent. “Go home.”

“I should —”

“You have done all you must tonight. Stattenholme was ready to gamble on civil war. Whatever else you have done —”

“— played right into his hands —”

“— you have saved the soul of this country. Let the rest lie.  _ Go home _ .”

Kirschen left after that, nothing more for him to do. But Festus stayed and waited for the street to empty. Waited until he was utterly alone in the shadow of the mansion. Until no one would see him drop his head into his hands.

The storm was still raging when he came back to the house, inside and out, the pounding rain and the thrumming aftershocks through every soul around him. Every room was dark. Every hearth was banked. Mia would be with Alamann, which was a fraction of comfort, though Festus wished she’d left a fire in his own bedroom at least. He could not remember ever being so cold. Or so tired.  _ Have I ever not been tired? _

He stood outside the closed door of Saul’s room, but could not bring himself to turn the handle and look in. If the boy had slept peacefully all through the storms of the night, let him sleep on. Let him sleep.  _ Shouldn’t see me like this _ . Shouldn’t know how close the land he now lived in had come to the broken land he still longed for.

_ You have saved the soul of this country _ . Would Sofia Furst have said so?

The fine dress uniform he’d worn to Parliament was soaked beyond recognition, and hideously heavy as he pulled it off.  The rainwater ran from his hair, loose and waterlogged, from his bare body to the bare floor. Mia’s wisely bequeathed handkerchief was still in his breast pocket; he tried to wipe his face, but quickly gave it up. His hand was much too unsteady. He sat on his bed and shivered. Body numb, mind a blank in the midst of the roiling in his soul.  _ Too close. Too close —  _ or was it  _ not close enough? _

Alone, in the quiet, in the dark, he had nothing but that struggle. Barely aware of himself, wavering on that knife’s edge, held in the convulsing soul-web like in crystallized ice. It was a mercy when the shivers of cold forced his mind to the physical present. He wrapped shaking arms around himself and fell into a thick, racking cough that made white pain burst in his head.  _ I am ill. That makes sense.  _ He tried to gather his hair to squeeze the water out, but found his hands gripping his skull instead, as if he could squeeze out the ache. The fear and the doubt. The seething of nine million souls with him pinned at their centre.  _ I’m tired. It’ll be clearer when I’m not so tired _ —

The thought cracked. His own voice in his mind could never speak over that other. _Excuses, boy. You know exactly what happened tonight. You’ve been here before._

Excuses. One way or another, it had come to one end.  _ We have both been played _ , he heard Kirschen’s words clearly in his mind, even over the tumult of the web. And he heard,  _ The promotion is deserved, but you’ve come as far as a man can tolerably come on merit.  _ And heard,  _ Your tuition was a frivolity, the graf requires that you pay it back _ . And  _ Ten years old? Ten strokes of the whip, then, and never argue with a taxman. _ And again, again, again,  _ Power is power and you are what you are. Give it up. Go home. Go back to the dirt you came from. _

“ **_No!_ ** ” he snarled, and twisted and yanked at his hair until the pain he caused was that much worse than the pain from inside. Until something flared in him that was close enough to anger to let him breathe.

He belonged to them and they belonged to him. The war was not over. The war could never be over.  _ Get to work. Stand up.  _ He stood up.

He made it three steps from his bed before his knees gave out, and all dissolved into darkness.


	16. Healing

At ten in the morning, a servant woke Saul up by coming into the guestroom with a tray piled high with a sumptuous breakfast. There were scrambled eggs the colour of sunshine, drenched in butter; blueberries and blackberries, fit to burst with sweet juice; rolled-up pancakes, each a perfect patchwork of brown and gold, powdered with sugar like goose down. There were rashers of bacon, crisped and gleaming; a pot of honey, a pot of cream, three pots of jams he couldn’t even name. There was a mug of coffee, black in the Ilyigan style.

Saul poked his fork about for a while, then pushed the whole production aside. His stomach was too knotted to contain one single bite.

The storm had breathed its last outside, and the house was very quiet. A hollow gray light lay upon the street outside. The sky was all a slab of winter. People moved here and there between the puddles as Saul watched from the window, a subtle press of hurry in their steps; it was all too clear that nobody wanted to linger here by the mansion. He turned his gaze about the bedroom then. Much too big. Velvet drapes and a canopied bed.  _ What am I doing here? _

Yunas Geitenholme was still dead. Nothing was going to change that.

To think it made his brain pick up speed again in a way he could barely fathom, much less contain. A sound crowded his throat, and instead of letting it out he pushed himself up from the bed with whipcrack violence. That proved no help at all. He dropped back down and sat staring at his own bare feet, then at his own empty hands.  _ I didn’t betray Attoré. I won’t  _ — _ where do I go? _

The sound of raised voices was sudden and startling, a welcome tug of distraction. He started toward the door at a creep, his toes sinking into the thick carpet, but quickly gave up on that when he realized the scale of the commotion. The shouts were ringing all through the mansion, “Damn you, Stattenholme, you scum, you honourless dog, you promised me my son —!”

Yorgen Geitenholme. Well inside the house, from the sound of it, storming up the curving stairway. Saul pushed the door wide open.

At the top of the stairs, not a dozen feet away, was Geitenholme: he spotted Saul immediately. Three of Stattenholme’s armsmen and a handful of servants stood behind and around the bereaved father, but none of them were able to stop him charging Saul with a wild howl. 

None of them, except Vestgaard. The mercenary caught Geitenholme from behind in an armlock that added a sheer note of pain to Geitenholme’s cry of rage as Vestgaard hauled the Freiherr back. Geitenholme continued to curse and sputter and froth until another door opened further down the corridor, and Duke Stattenholme emerged from his office: puffy-eyed with lost sleep, but calm and collected as he had never once failed to be in Saul’s sight.

“Yorgen,” the Duke said quietly. “Might we not make this a public spectacle?”

Geitenholme roared like a mad dog. “Spectacle —  _ spectacle!? _ My son lies murdered in your home! My boy, my heir — you made me a promise! Captured and returned, you said! For the sake of the country —”

“Bring him in,” Stattenholme said — not to Geitenholme, but to Vestgaard, who at once began to push Geitenholme toward the office. The Duke looked past the scene to see Saul, and nodded at him. “You, too.”

There was a coolness in his tone that Saul had not heard from him before. He walked into the office with some instinctive wariness, but one that could not find its edge. He hadn’t thought of what Stattenholme might want to do with him, or any other man.  _ Hang me, maybe _ . They could try. He could kill them. It didn’t matter much anymore.

The Duke was sitting at his desk, all business . Geitenholme stood in the far corner, back to the wall, Vestgaard still hovering by him. Saul saw the Freiherr’s mouth work when his son’s killer entered. The fact that Geitenholme could stop himself from spitting at him made him almost respect the man.

“Now.” Stattenholme looked from one of them to the other. “How are we to resolve this?”

Geiteholme’s voice was raw. “I want justice, Emen.”

“Come, Yorgen. It’s men like Detrich who bandy about words like  _ justice _ . We know better. What do you propose to do? Tell a court how this young man killed Yunas to stop your son from murdering my wife and child?”

“You were meant to be prepared for him! Your man would contain him, you said!”

“And would you tell them this, as well? That we only meant for him to kill the ambassador of Adalas? Unravel the whole conspiracy, then, go ahead. I shall see you at the gallows.”

Geitenholme snarled, jerking a pointed finger at Saul. “Then forget court and give me his head! He has no rights here! Your man should’ve killed him right there — made him choke on his own blood like my son choked — you promised me, Emen, you said I could take him away, hold his deeds over his head, drive some sense into him — oh, Yunas, my boy…” His voice cracked and withered, and he sagged back against the corner, a hand over his eyes.

Stattenholme looked at Saul. Saul looked back unblinking.  _ You could try _ .

“It is not for men like ourselves to shy from sacrifice,” the Duke said, very low. “You know why I do what I do, Freiherr, in keeping this lad here alive, as well. I did not promise you freedom from all risk. Your son played his part, even if not to the fullness of our designs. The mob rose, and the mob fell, just as we hoped. He did well.”

Geitenholme shook his head hard, silent for another long moment. The Duke spoke on, low and inexorable, “You have been through the city. It is marvellously subdued.”

“Quite to your design, yes…” Geitenholme rasped.

“They have seen their Land’s Own Guardian, their firebrand of the revolution, turn tail and slink away. We could have asked for no better outcome.”

“Is that it? Detrich’s humiliation — that is what you have bought for the life of my son?”

“If this stops Detrich’s war, then I have bought countless other lives.”

“Saved lives!” Geitenholme gave a bark of hysterical laughter. “Emen Stattenholme, hero of the people! You cannot lie to me this much. Not  _ this _ much. This is for your revenge —”

“ _ My _ revenge?” The Duke’s voice gained neither volume nor speed. “I would tell you to ask your father what he thinks of that — if Detrich had not dangled him from a tree for five days, until even the crows were full.”

Geitenholme made a sound in his throat, soft and ruined. The Duke lay his palms on his desk. “Enough, Yorgen. I cannot give you more. The Ilyigan lad lives, Yunas will have died by accident, and no one will ever know of his crime. You have two other sons. Take your boy home, and tell his brothers that his life was given for their future.”

He sat still, then, for long minutes ticking by, while Geitenholme’s slumped shoulders shook and shook, the Freiherr on the verge of open sobbing. He shook his head, too, again and again, but nothing changed, in the world or in Stattenholme’s face.

“Joost,” the Duke said at length to Vestgaard. “Take Yorgen to see his son. Make whatever arrangements he asks for.”

Mute and still shaking, Geiteinholme allowed himself to be led out. No rage now, not a word of protest. Stattenholme gave one, low sigh and turned the fullness of his attention to Saul.

“And what am I to do with you?”

_ Not hang me, apparently. _ Saul was still grasping that. In the absence of such immediate danger to rise to, his mind was emptying again. 

“Well?” Stattenholme’s eyes were as chill as last night’s storm. “Do you mean to explain yourself? I hope you will forgive me if I am not at my most patient. That was a frankly excellent plan you’ve ruined.”

“How was I supposed to know? I thought Vestgaard betrayed you.”

“Joost could not so much as dream of betraying me. We could have freed Gerfroy’s poor wife from her fool husband, exchanged some furious diplomatic protests with Adalas, then acknowledged grave injury to both sides and been done. Now, instead, I am left to deal with Yorgen’s grievances.”

_ He really is angry _ . That was new. That roused faint curiosity in him, an odd desire to see more. “Did you plan it all — the riot, too?”

“Not the riot, no. No one can plan such frenzies — well.” The Duke’s eyes narrowed a fraction in thought. “Perhaps Detrich can. But I do not play on his field. I took advantage, that is all.”

“If he hadn’t backed down, it would have been —”

“Civil war? Perhaps. But he backed down.” Stattenholme’s gaze grew pensive. He leaned back in his seat, let his head drop against the headrest. “Like all common-born folk, Detrich is moved by base emotion, not reason. Driven equally by love for his people, and hate for all hierarchy and order. When he is strong, the anger and bloodlust are strong. But wear him down enough — as I’ve been doing for weeks — and love will make him hesitate. He wants very badly to be loved, you know.” He closed his eyes. “What a thing to ruin a man.”

The sudden blooming ache in his throat caught Saul off his guard. He swallowed past it, shoved it down his throat, his chest, to bury it in his belly. He would not make the pathetic sight that Geitenholme had. He cast about for more questions to ground himself. “So how did you know Yunas would come last night?”

“His little band is — hm,  _ was _ full of noblemen’s sons supposedly reformed by the revolution. Find—ing one soured on it all and willing to inform was child’s play.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

Likely not. The whole thing was done. “And that’s how you knew about the shooting, too? Before Detrich came back to the capitol, I mean. You had an informant.”

“Oh, no. I know better than to try to turn Detrich’s handpicked soldiers against him, Sun’s grace! But I have other sources.”

Strange, but the way he said the word sparked a reminder in Saul’s swirling thoughts.  _ When did he tell me last  _ — _ about  _ **_sources_ ** ? But even his curiosity, no more than his wariness or defiance, could not be whetted into any edge.  _ I can’t go back _ . The world was a dull place, and empty.

“Well.” Stattenholme opened his eyes, shifting forward in his seat again with a sigh. “It needn’t matter very much. Your way back to Ilyiga is secured. Soon you will be gone from here, Yorgen will see the bigger picture, and all will be resolved for the best.” He flicked a hand in dismissal. “You are free to leave, though speak with Anké first. She mentioned a token of gratitude she has for you.”

_ Leave _ . Saul didn’t move, even when the Duke began to look at him strangely.  _ Where would I go?  _ The way back to Ilyiga — he’d hardly thought of it since that first day, when he had told Stattenholme that Attoré would not take him back as a soldier, and Stattenholme had said,  _ Be whatever else you wish to be.  _ It had not seemed real, since. Since Detrich had asked,  _ What is it you want?  _ And Saul had sworn to never betray him.

_ What is it you want?  _ It felt like putting pressure on a barely healed bone. His fists seized closed. Stattenholme tilted his head at him.

“What’s the matter, boy?”

“I —” Not saying it wouldn’t change anything. “I can’t go back to him.”  _ I should’ve listened _ . “He won’t take me back.”

Stattenholme looked at him for a moment longer; then, to Saul’s astonishment, he gave a faint snort. “Yes, he will.”

“I broke his rules —”

“Not for the first time, I believe?”

“What do  _ you _ know about —”

“Please.” Another flick of a hand, aristocratic and careless. “I should hope that by now, you have ample proof of my ability to judge what Festus Detrich will or will not do. How is he, for that matter? I heard he seemed quite unwell last night.”

Saul was still reeling at that easy counter to his agonizing certainty. He answered without thinking, “He’s tired. Sick. Can’t sleep and won’t stop working.”

“Colour me unsurprised. Fever, a bad cough? Pneumonia almost killed him once, you know, in the revolution. Winter is a wretched time for a Land’s Own, and all this stress and overwork on top of that… well. He should take care. If someone smothers him in his sleep…” Stattenholme was looking down at his papers now. He sketched a shrug. “It might be that no one will ever know.”

He chose a sheet of paper then, and without as much as a blink began scribbling on it. Leaving Saul to stand, and stare, and stew — and be seized by a tremor of terrible hope.

He had to leave the room to try and think about it clearly, ran down the staircase only to freeze before the mansion doors. He didn’t trust Stattenholme. Even less, if anything, now that he’d seen the Duke’s machinations in play. But these schemes all pointed one way.  _ What does he have to gain from sending me back just to be thrown out?  _ If Stattenholme had wanted him parted from Detrich, all he would have had to do was say nothing.

Instead he had said very much.  _ Almost killed him once. A wretched time. He should take care _ . The words echoed, circled, drilled down in Saul’s mind. Detrich in the yard, in the mud and rain, pouring every ounce of his strength into the web. Asleep over his desk, dragged under by exhaustion and illness. Sitting in the darkened kitchen, alone, half-drowned in a black fog — and he’d given Saul his drink.  _ You need this more than me _ .

One moment he was thinking,  _ He won’t take me back _ . The next:  _ I can’t leave him _ .

He needed to go home. Needed to go  _ now _ . But his heart had again picked up its relentless pounding, his mouth dry as he stared at the doors. When a maid came up to ask him to attend on Her Grace, he found himself following her without argument. She led him to another staircase and directed him downward. Down into the cool earth, under arches of stone, to the door to the mansion’s cellar.

The door was not quite shut. Beyond it, Anké Stattenholme was speaking very gently.

“— all arranged, Freiherr. When you are ready.”

“Thank you, my girl.” And Geitenholme, his voice cracked with weeping. Saul crept a step closer, looked in as much as he was able. In the dim light, he saw little more than Geitenholme’s back where he sat bent over in his chair, and Anké behind him holding a lantern. Her hand was on the grieving man’s shoulder, and his hand on hers. Saul could just make out the table before Geitenholme, and guess what lay there, where the air was still and cool. “I am — I am sorry. He was a boy led astray. You should not have —”

“He is forgiven. As are you.” Her voice dropped. “I know I cannot ask the same for my husband…”

“I will not fault you for it.” Geitenholme’s tattered sigh echoed in the vault. “You should not have been sent — they truly thought it best, you know. Your mother and father. I know you wished —”

“Let us not speak of it.”

“I realize I should have — if I had given him more freedom — we old folk push you, the young, into our designs, our battles… he should have been granted his love. You should have been granted your schooling…”

“Freiherr Geitenholme,” the Duchess said softly. “Please, do not taunt me with dreams.”

They both fell silent, then, a thick silence, one that shut each of them behind their own doors of regret. Saul waited. There was something here that was beyond him: some riddle beyond the questions, unanswered but at least known, of Stattenholme’s plans and his scheming, something that drew him in even as it left him utterly frustrated. In between the all but physical waves of the anxious need to go back, he thought,  _ I don’t know anything _ , and then thought:  _ What is it I don’t know? _

“Anké,” Geitenholme spoke up again, quite suddenly, and in an altogether different voice. It rose with clarity, and with hard-clutched firmness, pressing almost. “My girl. Listen to me. Perhaps I should not say this, but for my friendship with your family… I don’t know what your husband might have plotted with your brother when he visited. I have some suspicions, but… they are not of the sort that can be voiced. Not in this country, and least of all today.”

Saul heard Anké’s faint swallow. “I… have some notions.”

“I’m certain he believes he acts in your best interests. And Hyem’s, though all this business with Ilyigan warlords and Lansikaan mercenaries…”

“I cannot fault my husband using what tools he must.”

“I’d have said the same, before today. Perhaps I still would, if it were my grief only. Certainly, the guilt here is my own as much as his.” Geitenholme’s voice almost failed again. But he cleared his throat and continued twice as firmly, “But you, my girl — you are guiltless. I know you love him. I know. Perhaps he loves you. But I will tell you nonetheless:  _ don’t trust Emen Stattenholme _ . Don’t trust in his love or his care. He pretends to be a cold creature, but hate drives him no less than it drives Detrich. Detrich is a savage, yes, one we all have cause to hate. But now, between them… if I must throw my lot in with a monster, better it be the honest one.”

It was the last thing Saul might have expected to hear. He was startled enough, and rattled enough already, that a hissing sound slipped out between his teeth.

Geitenholme didn’t seem to hear, but Anké stiffened. Saul jerked back from the door and glanced over his shoulder and down the corridor. It was too late to make a silent retreat. Anke said, “Pardon me a moment, Freiherr,” and moved toward the door.

She emerged looking unsurprised to see him, but otherwise utterly frayed. He thought back to his first glimpse of her in the Duke’s carriage, and the next day in the market when she wore summer-blue. Her dress was a plain one now, all black, and her skin was near white against it. She offered him a smile, and it was brittle and strange.

Saul gave a twitching nod in return, not quite sure why. She shut the door behind her. As she turned back to him he realized she held something in the crook of her arm. A bottle: the same kind of Adalan whiskey that Basholme had brought to the Land’s Own’s house, to sit and tell war stories over.

“Young Fro Saul,” she whispered. “I am sorry that I haven’t long. But I did not want you to leave empty-handed.”

Saul looked at the bottle in sudden resentment. “I told you Easterners aren’t —”

“Oh, no — this is not for you.” A firm shake of her head, and a moment’s lost look. “I… do not quite know what to give  _ you _ in thanks. I can only say… for my daughter, there is no reward too great.”

Expecting him to make a request, maybe. Saul stood at a loss of his own. He had nothing he wanted that could be given. All he wanted was to go back. The courage to go back.

“Then what’s this?” He nodded at the bottle at last.

“This is… for Fro Detrich.” Her voice had dropped even lower. She continued, hesitant, into his shocked silence. “I know he indulges only rarely. But I understand he is unwell, and this may be a comfort. Last night…” She swallowed hard. “My husband has his plans, perhaps. But I was only a woman with her child, trapped and surrounded by a mob. And that mob dispersed at his word.” She raised a hand when Saul shifted in place, the rest of it rushing out of her. “I know it was not for our sake. I know the enmity between us. But… for that, please, give him my thanks and my token. Twice over, for his actions and yours. For my Amika’s life.”

Saul opened his mouth to respond, though he hardly knew what to say.  _ Come back with me _ , certainly not — she was the Duchess Stattenholme. If there had been time, perhaps he would have asked,  _ What do you want, Frowe Anké  _ — but she pushed the bottle into his hands, and turned at once on her heel, and slipped back behind the closed door.

The bottle was heavy in his hand. Cool. Expensive, he knew from Detrich’s good-natured grumbling at Basholme’s gift. With nothing else to his name he could live and travel some distance on the price it might fetch in the market. Get out of the capitol, and after —

There was no  _ after _ . There was no real question. He ran back through the tunnel, up the stairs, out through the mansion’s door and gates. Ran down the street, ran home.

* * *

Festus woke, and it was the dead of night. A candle burned somewhere in his awareness. Through a dim haze, a chill confusion wrapped around his mind and senses. He was aware of someone prodding him to get up from the floor where he lay, to put on a house-robe, drink a mug of something hot, and get into bed. Someone pulled the covers over him, murmuring soft unhappiness all the while. He croaked out a name, he wasn’t sure which; he just barely recognized Mia’s voice when darkness took him again.

He woke, and it was an icy near-dawn, and his body had a hundred different complaints. He lay shivering and sweating under the covers, limp and half-insensate with fever, his head full of hot lead and his chest pressed by iron bands. When he breathed in deep to steady himself, he began coughing so badly he thought his ribs would burst. And yet all of it was a welcome distraction from the web.

The cough brought Mia running into the room. He drank the honeyed water she gave him, and thought he managed to tell her he was sorry before he was gone under again.

He woke. Just outside the door, Mia was speaking with Hedi, too low for him to make out much. He didn’t know what time it was. He didn’t know how long he’d slept or what might have happened in the city. All he could get of the soul-web was its own exhausted pain, a tangle weary of being pulled in all directions.  _ You have saved the soul of this country _ , Kirschen had said. But the soul of the country felt full of his own sickness.

He tried to pull himself up in bed, and failed, just as the door opened and Mia entered yet again. She looked herself utterly exhausted, though moving with the energy of grim resolve. When she saw him awake and lucid something cracked all across her face, and she was across the room and throwing her arms around her before Festus could even try to apologise again.

“Frowe Weber —” he croaked, and she pulled back just before the squeeze set him coughing again.

“Oh — Sun’s sake.” She wiped her eyes, and put the cup of water from the bedside table into his hands. “I don’t know what — I’m sorry.”

“No, I am —” They’d go a while if they started. “What’s the time?”

“A little past ten o’clock. The riot was last night — you only slept some eight hours.”

Eight hours in one almost-unbroken stretch.  _ I’m very sick.  _ “How is it? Out there?”

She hesitated, but at last said, “It’s quiet. But… likely because no papers were published this morning.”

_ That’s happening, then _ . It wasn’t unexpected. But his mind wouldn’t form the next thought, outrage or planning, or, in a way, even hurt. He felt nothing but tired and heavy and lost.  _ How do I guard this land? _

Mia was watching him with narrowed eyes. No doubt waiting for him to try and jump up. “Hedi said you’re to have complete bedrest until she decides you’re fit for anything else. Ten days at least.”

“Ten days?!”

“And one more for every time you try to disobey her.”

“I have work —”

“You have pneumonia. She said either you heal yourself, or it’s bedrest. Or you  _ could _ die if that’s what best pleases you.”

His instinct was to argue. To fight. He hadn’t the breath for it.  _ Heal yourself  _ — _ yes  _ — _ just a drop of soul power…  _ but the power came from the souls of the people. What had he given them, to have the right to take in turn?

He had saved the souls of the nation, Kirschen had said. But another voice said,  _ You couldn’t even give them war _ .

“Mia,” he rasped. “Did I do right?”

Fresh tears flooded her eyes; but he did not know what for, who for. She said nothing. He didn’t know her answer, and thought she did not know it either. In silence, she took the soaked rag from the bowl on the bedside table, squeezed it out, and gently wiped his face.

It stretched out, the silence. Festus almost slept again. Too easy, now, to sleep, when all else was slipping from between his fingers. His mind drifted aimlessly between tatters of thought, even the stabbing coughs offering hardly enough pain to focus on. He thought of Kirschen, alone somewhere in the city. Of Basholme, further away and no less alone. Of Marten and Lisel Furst, and their children, each seeking out a better life in his or her own way. They had trusted him. No doubt they trusted him still. He shivered and shifted under Mia’s hand, fighting down the urge to move it away.

“You should be with Alamann,” he croaked.

“I should.” Her voice held an echo of its usual spirit. “We’ll talk about my pay when you’ve recovered some.”

“We will.” He felt a touch better at that, the small promise. It was well deserved. Fifty more kroner a month, perhaps, and here was a young life that could be patched together and remade whole. If only, if only… “You should go. Saul can help me.” Where  _ was _ the brat? It wasn’t like Saul to sleep late, and less like him to sleep through all the action of the night, with Mia finding Festus collapsed, and Hedi coming, and never mind the state of the city outside…

Mia went a shade paler and shifted her gaze from his.

Festus’s chest seized. “Mia?” She would not look at him. “Where is Saul?” Asleep in his bed, had been his assumption last night, hearing nothing but silence from the lad’s room. Safe and peaceful, as peaceful as anything could be. Mia was twisting the soaked rag between her fingers. “What —”

“He went out.”

“Went — what? Where — why —” Had he gone to the riot?  _ Why didn’t he come to me?  _ Had Saul seen him talk down the crowd, send them away? “He isn’t home?”  _ Has he gone to Stattenholme?  _ The question came unbidden, unthinkable, unbearable.  _ Where is he, my boy? _

Downstairs, a sudden hammering at the door. Mia leapt to her feet, rushed out of the room before Festus could speak another word. She left him lying, blinking, failing to take in air.  _ What  _ — _ why — has he turned on me?  _ Kopfler had. He’d trusted Kopfler. Had trusted Aberhern, too, once. Had trusted his own will. Everything had been a machination, a careful plot to drain all his strength and turn him on his own people at the moment of truth. Stattenholme could offer riches, honours.  _ What can you offer, you wretch?  _ He’d hanged Willie Arnbau, his own man. For mercy.  _ No, please, not this  _ —

Raised voices from below. He couldn’t place or name them. The thunder of feet up the stairs. With the last of his strength he sat up. The door burst open. Saul came crashing in, flushed and gulping in air. Stumbling over his own feet, hair a flyaway mess, eyes huge. A lost boy at the threshold.

He gasped, “I came back.”

_ Yes _ , Festus thought, dizzy and feather-light suddenly with his easy, how painless his breath felt. He reached out a hand as Saul fell to his knees by the bed, and murmured, “I knew you would.”

* * *

_ I knew you would. _

Saul’s breath wouldn’t settle. The wood of the floor felt like ice under his knees.  _ I knew you would _ . And he believed it.

He choked out, “I’m sorry.”

On the bed, Detrich looked like death looming, colourless under the flush of fever, down to the haze over the ocean-blue of his eyes. Every breath he took crackled in his chest and throat.  _ He’s terribly ill _ , Mia had told Saul by the door, had almost stopped him going up before he’d pushed right past her,  _ he deals with enough, he doesn’t need you, too. _ But Detrich reached out his hand and put it on Saul’s shoulder. Too hot, and too heavy. Faintly grasping, fingers trembling as they closed in. A grasp that would not let go.

“Where have you been, lad?” the Land’s Own rasped. Not all-knowing. Only a man who slept and bled. But one who trusted him, who trusted him still.

Saul swallowed, and said, “I took your knife. I killed Yunas Geitenholme."

Detrich’s hand tightened, just a fraction, though it hurt like a blade’s edge. And then Saul was telling the whole story, pouring it out in a rush as it threatened to stick in his windpipe, of his fight with the rich students and his meeting with Sofia Furst, of training the students, telling Sofia all she asked, thinking how obvious it was,  _ Stattenholme needs to die _ . Of Mia finding him in the night, and the realization, and the race and hunt and Yunas’s final words, and thinking  _ I didn’t mean _ and knowing that was a lie. He told it all, and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry — I should have listened — why didn’t I listen —!” and his voice broke and he could speak no more.

He knew what came now. What came after. Knew it with a certainty that froze his bones.  _ He’s going to throw me out _ .

Detrich’s hand on his shoulder moved. Rose an inch, breaking the contact, leaving the cold winter air to seep in. And further up.

His fingers brushed through Saul’s hair.

“No,” the Land’s Own mumbled as Saul sat, blinking, failing to take in air, baffled and undone and knowing nothing but that the warm touch had returned. “My fault… if I’d taught you better, healed you better…”

His voice faded, but his hand kept moving, Slow strokes, and tender, and Saul closed his eyes and sat motionless as though waiting to wake from a dream, until Detrich murmured, “Should have had better than me.”

He said no more after that, and for a while Saul lost track of time, sitting in the warm, quiet room with Detrich’s hand on his head. At some point the door opened a crack, and Mia peeked in, the bottle of whiskey that Saul had thrust at her in her hand. She took in the sight, put the bottle down on the floor, and shut the door again on a small satisfied sound. And then, silence: nothing from the world outside, not even the house and its clocks. Detrich’s breathing was coarse but steady, fallen into a slow rhythm. And Saul closed his eyes and felt something that he could call peace.

It lasted until the rhythm broke, and Detrich jerked up in the bed in a fit of wretched, wet coughing that sent Saul scrambling to his feet. He had heard men’s bodies make such broken sounds before, knew all about the slow death they heralded, and nothing of how to thwart it. His hand shook as he poured out a glass from the pitcher on the bedside table; Detrich’s hand shook worse taking the mug. But between them they managed. His breathing as steady as it would get, the Land’s Own lay back again with one hand on his chest, his face tight with pain.

Saul knew little more about easing pain of any kind, but in a flash he remembered the whiskey. He brought the bottle over and uncorked it with his knife — Detrich’s knife — while Detrich watched with bleary confusion.

“Where did you get…?”

“The Duchess gave it to me.” Saul poured out half a glass. “It’ll help you sleep.”

Detrich took the glass without looking. His gaze was entirely on Saul, with a look that suggested he suspected himself delirious. “The Duchess —  _ again _ ?”

“Yes — no, it’s —” He was at a loss to explain Anké Stattenholme. But her words, he thought, Detrich might understand. “In thanks, she said. For saving her daughter from the riot. For what you did — what we did.”

He was not ready for the way these words struck Detrich, like the shimmer of sunlight on water: a moment’s amazement, warm on the Land’s Own’s drawn features. And from within it, a flash of strange, uneven gratitude.

Detrich murmured, “Perhaps right after all.”

He raised the glass very slightly, a shadow of a toast, and emptied it in one gulp.

The drink made him cough again, a few hard spasms, before the lines of his face began to soften.  _ He isn’t angry _ . The rest was beyond Saul to understand, but he saw that much, and it was still almost too grand a thing to bear. He swallowed. Refilled the glass. Looked for something to say. “What is it like?”

“Have some.” Detrich flicked two fingers at the bottle in lieu of a proper gesture. “You’re tense. Go on.”

The Unconquered Sun would forgive him, or else it was none of His business. There was no second glass, so Saul drank from the bottle, a full swallow that burned like lightning down his throat. Warmth bloomed beautiful in his belly, and then it all  _ was _ too much, and he sat on the bed with a heavy thump, and looked at Detrich and said, “What I did…”

Detrich looked back at him, but said nothing. He was drinking the second glass more slowly, in quiet enjoyment of the rare pleasure, and the softness had reached his eyes. He was all quiet attention now; too sick to cut or blaze, perhaps, but openly listening. Waiting for Saul to find words if he could. And he could — in that silence, he found them trickling out of the openness that had lived in him, as though waiting for its moment, since the first day when he was let back into Detrich’s home.

He said, “I was so sure. That Stattenholme had to die. You gave me orders — but — it was so obvious. Killing him was justified. He is your enemy.”

Detrich’s voice was faintly slurred. “That isn’t justice.”

“I didn’t do it for justice. I did it for  _ you _ . I’m not — I can’t be Hyemi. I don’t understand your country and your people and I don’t care — I don’t know what a worthy end is. But you — I — I swore I would not betray you. And I — and I —”

“And have you?”

“I ignored your orders, I took your weapon — I killed a man who wanted to fight for you. He went about it wrong, but he fought for you all the same. I didn’t need to kill him. He was just a useless boy. And you said —” He swallowed. “You said mercy, but not treason.”

He froze, then, because, weak and weary and mournful and fond, Detrich gave one breath of laughter.

“Oh, lad,” he mumbled, “You have it exactly backwards.”

He finished the second glass, reached out and, before Saul could quite process the gesture, clumsily stroked Saul’s hair again.

“We’ll talk it through when I can breathe,” he said. “Last night you were my soldier. Let the rest lie.”

He closed his eyes, clearly drained, and lay back. Saul watched him with his heart filling his throat. A heat rose in his eyes. For once, he recognized the tears for what they were.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he took another long drink from the bottle. The liquor slowed his thoughts, drew them out, each of them a great depth to plunge into. He unspooled it back in his mind again, Willie Arnbau’s story, hanged for two enemy lives, and the stricken look on Detrich’s face when Saul had said , _ This was the only way he could have saved them _ . He thought about what Stattenholme had said —  _ he wants very badly to be loved, you know —  _ thought about the Duchess’s thanks, and how Detrich’s amazement at them had changed his face.  _ He wants very badly to be loved _ . And, with sudden but total conviction:  _ I love him _ .

The tears had retreated, thought his chest still felt tight. His breath came shallow and strange. He couldn’t quite parse why. Detrich had gone very still in his sleep, though at least he wasn’t coughing. He wasn’t —

Saul’s gut turned to ice.  _ He isn’t breathing. _

He leapt up. Leaned in. Grabbed Detrich’s shoulder and shook and  _ shook _ . Nothing happened.  _ No, no!  _ He slammed Detrich back against the headboard, and the Land’s Own’s lolling head snapped up with a reedy gasp. His eyes opened a fraction, clouded, mindless. Closed again. His chest didn’t rise. Saul choked on a whimper and curled clawed fingers in Detrich’s robe, shook him again. Hideously long seconds until Detrich woke with another, fainter gasp. “Stop,” he mumbled, “Stop. Let me sleep…”

“You weren’t breathing!”

“Please, I’m so tired…”

His eyes closed again, and again sleep snuffed his breath out. Saul slapped him hard. “You can’t sleep! You can’t!” Detrich stared at him in baffled hurt. His lips moved, but there was too little air in him to push words out. Saul’s heart lurched. His lungs struggled to fill.  _ What’s happening?!  _ This was panic — this was  _ more _ than panic. He knew how panic felt. This was  _ wrong _ . This was —

His eyes fell on the bottle by the bed. And he remembered something else that Stattenholme had said:  _ If someone smothers him in his sleep… _

And now it  _ was _ panic. He lunged for the door and yanked it open, leaned out, bellowed down the stairs, “ _ Mia!  _ Get Hedi here  _ now! _ ”

The housekeeper shouted some question back, but Saul wasn’t listening. He was already on the bed again. In another moment he heard the front door slam shut. And then nothing mattered but keeping his hold on Detrich, jarring him awake, ignoring his delirious pleas for rest. Ignoring his own stuttering breath and light-headedness. Hissing, again and again, in Detrich’s ear, “I won’t die. You won’t die.”

He lost track of time again. When footsteps came thundering up the stairs he was so startled he nearly grabbed for the knife. Hedi burst through the door white-faced and panting, Mia in her wake. The sight of them, their high alarm, brought a spark of awareness back into Detrich’s eyes. He struggled to pull himself up, grabbing Saul’s wrist for support.

“What — what’s happened —?”

Hedi rushed to him. Saul had to force himself to move aside and leave her room to work. He blurted out, “It’s the drink. It’s poisoned. Something that makes breathing hard. We both drank, and he —”

“Give me a moment!” the physician snapped. She was holding Detrich’s wrist, absorbed in counting his pulse. But the Land’s Own himself stirred even further.

“The drink — the Duchess’s?”

He sounded hazy. Confused, though the connection wasn’t brutally obvious. And yet that did stop Hedi, froze her in place, and Mia sucked in air in high-pitched horror with her hands flying up to her mouth. And, dizzy with it, Saul thought,  _ They believe me _ .

Hedi released Detrich’s hand and grabbed the bottle instead. She sloshed the liquid about, stared into it, sniffed and tasted it. Next she turned to Saul, took his pulse, made him breathe in and out, looked into his eyes. At last she again examined Detrich, whose eyelids were drooping steadily. And she whispered, “Oh, Sun’s mercy.”

She looked up to Saul and Mia with a raw and helpless look. “It’s some kind of suppressant. I think I know the one. It wouldn’t kill a healthy man, but with his lungs so weakened —  _ Festus! _ ” And now she was grabbing Detrich’s shoulder and shaking him with all her strength, her voice a strangled shout and climbing — “Wake  _ up! _ ”

She just about dragged him to consciousness. But Saul knew, and saw that she knew.  _ How many times?  _ Mia was marshalling herself and speaking quickly: “All right, we’ll keep him awake. I have ice. Needles, if we have to —” and Hedi: “Smelling salts, in my bag —” and between them Detrich was muttering, incoherent, something about taxes and figures and “It’s wrong, this is wrong, I have proof…” And the poison churned in Saul’s veins and his breathing would not steady, and he rasped, “He needs to heal himself. Tell him to take the power and heal himself!”

The two women barely even paused. Mia threw a “Forget it!” over her shoulder as she flew out the door. Hedi swallowed and shook her head. Her instruments rattled in the bag. Saul wanted to hit her. “Tell him. _Make him!_ ” She said nothing. Her shoulders trembled. He whirled on the fading Detrich. “You have power! Do it, you old fool!” The Land’s Own’s eyes were glazed. _He isn’t seeing me_. “ _Do it!_ ”

“No,” Detrich muttered, losing air, losing time. “No, not for me, no…”

No defiance. He was past that. Past reason, too. Deep, deep in whatever dark place he saw into whenever his sight turned inward.  _ Places in him none of us can reach _ . Saul grabbed him, shook him, slammed fists against his chest. But he was sinking, sinking.

Hedi found her smelling salts. They did nothing. Mia burst in with her ice, even her needles; they did little more. “Get Ander,” Hedi told her, desperate. “Now. Maybe he can —” She turned back to Detrich’s unmoving form. Raked her hand through his hair, pled, begged, “Festus, wake up, heal yourself, please. For Ander. For me. For all of us who love you — please,  _ please _ , for our people —!”

No answer. No sound. The world blurred before Saul’s eyes.  _ It isn’t enough.  _ And snapped into the sharpness of deadly steel.  _ It isn’t enough _ . He reached over the surgeon, pulled Detrich up by the collar, and snarled in his face with every drop of hatred in his heart: " _ If you die, then Stattenholme wins! _ "

Under his hand, like a wing breaking free of a bond, Detrich’s chest expanded.

He sucked in air like a drowning man, his back arching with the sheer force of it. Next to Saul, Hedi cried out, and from outside the sound came of Mia stumbling on the last stair. Hot light raced over the Land’s Own’s skin. The earth below the house pulsed about its foundations. One great heartbeat. And Detrich’s eyes opened clear.

On breathing in again he started coughing, which snapped Hedi out of the shock of the moment and into action. She caught and braced him, pulled his hair out of the way as he bent over the edge of the bed and retched. She murmured in Hyemi and Detrich rasped something back. Saul couldn’t quite hear, much less understand. He was sitting back, dazed, feeling his own lungs labour to expand, drained of all feeling in the world but relief.  _ He’s alive. We’re alive. _

He let his head drop back against the wall. When Mia burst again into the room, he scooted aside just enough to let her, too, collapse to sit on the edge of the bed. If her shoulder nudged his, he didn’t mind it. They watched Hedi prod Detrich — weak as a kitten, but lucid — into taking deep breaths while she listened at his chest. At last she let him lie back, brushing his hair from his face. “How do you feel?”

“Awful,” Detrich croaked, eyes shut. “But I’m alive to feel it.”

“Your fever is lower, too. I think you’ve pushed through the worst of it.”

“Did I take…”

“Too much? Never, Festus. Never.” And she leaned in and touched her lips to his brow; and for a moment, the calm that came over Detrich’s face was unlike anything Saul had ever seen.

Then, a wave of new alarm: he pushed upward again to straighten, looking around. “Where is — Saul, is he all right? Is —” 

Their eyes met. Saul said nothing; too tired to think, feeling like a sky clearing of a storm, he dropped slowly down onto the bed, curled up on his side under Detrich’s reaching hand.

Hedi was talking. Something about plenty of rest and water until the poison left his body. Mia began to say something — something about Duke Stattenholme, but a yawn cut her off. “Later,” Hedi was saying. “Sleep now. All of you. Forget everything, sleep.”

Saul closed his eyes.

The last he heard, before sleep came, was a faint noise of glass against wood as Hedi picked up the bottle. “I’ll keep hold of this. You’ll need it, won’t you?”

And Detrich’s voice, low, hoarse, and deeply satisfied: “Oh,  _ yes _ .”


	17. What Comes After

Festus woke, and the room was warm, and a gentle light shone behind his eyelids.

He lay still, marvelling in the feeling of clarity. Not quite health: his airways still felt raw, his head heavy and his bones lined with a chill weight. But they were not the gutting claws of winter in his flesh, not the tangible echoes of bitter defeat; the illness was only that. Illness passed. He’d come so close to sinking, freezing, drowning. Any air, any warmth, were bliss.

The gift of the web. He remembered little of the previous night, nothing at all after the sound of Hedi shouting at him to stay awake, but that much he knew. He’d taken his life from the souls of the people. A debt, a duty. _A trust_.

His mind came slowly back to the world around him. On the floor nearby, someone was snoring — that would be Saul. _He should be in his own bed_. Someone else was sitting on the edge of the bed, and another in the bedside chair, speaking quietly together.

“— drew on the web?” Kirschen, his voice soft with amazement.

Then Hedi: “I couldn’t believe it, either — but you felt it, didn’t you?”

“I felt — him. I did not know what precisely he was doing.”

“It can’t be anything else. His improvement is remarkable. If the fever breaks soon, I might let him out of bed by the end of this week.”

The temptation was too great. Festus opened his eyes. “Don’t make me promises you don’t mean to keep.”

Hedi gave a tiny yelp of joyful surprise, and he smiled at her as he tried to sit up. He had just about managed it before Kirschen moved in from the edge of the bed and caught him in the total embrace of a man trying to make his body a shield.

“Is it true?” he rasped against Festus’s shoulder.

“What is — careful, I’ll cough all over you —”

“Damn to that. Did Stattenholme truly have you _poisoned_?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Festus answered quietly. And if there were a note of vicious gladness in his voice, well enough.

Slowly, as though aching for every inch of lost contact, Kirschen drew back. He looked as close as he ever came to dishevelled: shadows under his eyes, his shave just a touch less than immaculate. Had Festus not been waylaid by the coughing he’d warned of, he would not have been able to lean away; as it was, he tried to twitch aside as Hedi handed him a cup of water. “It’s fine — I’m fine, it’s —”

“Call it a small thing,” Kirschen said flatly, “and you will sleep in a cold bed until summer.”

General Ander Kirschen did not make idle threats. Festus lay back, equal parts grudging and desperately smitten with the man, and surrendered his dignity to the surgeon’s poking yet again. It was nighttime, he realized, a deep candlelit night that meant he must have slept some ten, maybe twelve hours. Saul was on the floor as he expected, bundled up in a goosedown quilt. He reached out into the web, felt Mia’s soul in deep rest down in the office, in his own armchair.

He reached further out, into the web that had given him back life and breath. To the slumbering city, full of souls dimmed by ashy defeat. Winter lay heavy on the land beyond. A desperate season, and so much more when one felt powerless and aimless. The scene of the crowd retreating from Stattenholme’s gates was vivid in his mind as he tracked its echoes. The dry and dusty riverbed left where momentum, where anger, defiance, and purpose and all their energy, had been dammed. _We’ve all been played._ That was power, and that was all…

But there was clarity, too. _I’m not finished._ _For my people, that bastard will not win._

“Sun bless, I see no no relapse,” Hedi said at last. Now it was her turn to rub tired eyes. “You’re doing very well — which is not to say you have my leave to go banging down the doors of Parliament, whatever cause you have.”

Oh, what cause he had. “Not quite yet.”

“But it _was_ poison.” Kirschen was no more likely to let go of the point than of Festus’s hand. “You are certain.”

Hedi bit her lower lip. Hers had always been a slow courage, and quiet; and yet. “A drug, technically speaking. But… that’s the cleverness of it. Hardly any poisons kill quickly and leave no sign. But take deep exhaustion and an inflammation of the lungs, combine a drug suppressing respiration, and you have a quiet and unsuspicious death. If poor Saul hadn’t drunk as well — the signs were obvious in him, you see, blown pupils and the like — we’d be none of us the wiser.”

“Had he not drunk, and had he not called for you.” Kirschen’s voice was subtly sharp.

“Yes — and told me at once what to look for, as well.”

“He may be safely absolved of involvement, then.”

“Involvement?” Festus almost bristled; since it was Kirschen, he breathed out a laugh instead. “You think he’s in Stattenholme’s pay? Let me tell you what the lad’s done. Do you know what he was doing, while you and I were caught in Stattenholme’s game? He chased down Yunas Geitenholme. Yunas had gone to kill the Duke and his family, and Stattenholme was ready for it. He’d planned to let Yunas kill Cullough and use that to call things even with Adalas. With the queen’s leave, I’m sure. They didn’t account for Saul.”

He paused, catching his breath, and cast a look over the edge of the bed at the bundle of peacefully snoring boy. _My soldier_. “Saul killed Yunas — a damned tragedy, yes, but now Yorgen’s broken with Stattenholme. And Cullough is alive and deeply suspicious of the host who couldn’t keep him safe. Every foothold we lost, he’s gained back with interest.”

He looked up. Kirschen was studying Saul with a deeply thoughtful look, the look of a man used to trusting his own judgement making a re-evaluation. Hedi’s eyes, meanwhile, were wide.

“He killed Yunas Geitenholme?”

“Yes — and that’s on my head, not his.”

“Great Sun, why?”

 _Why?_ He’d given orders; Saul had defied them. With impunity, in a moment’s rage, it hardly mattered. _Things that break remain broken._ But Saul had said — how many times had he said it? _I want to learn_.

A bright young thing, full of potential, forced to take up war and bargain away his future… _and_ _I promised him a worthy end_.

“The boy was raised in civil war,” Kirschen spoke up quietly. “He does what he knows how to do.”

“I was raised in a starving backwater.”

“Is it the same, Festus?”

“Isn’t it?” He looked them in the eye, and neither could stand the look. And he looked down at Saul again, a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with illness. “He saved our cause, the country — and me. He… reached me, somehow. When I was almost gone. Not alone, not without you — not without you — the two of you, and Mia, and Alamann and Gus and the web — but he reached me. If he were Hyemi…”

There was little and less point in finishing that sentence. But the thought flashed through his mind anyway, a bursting lighting. _If he were Hyemi, he’d have been a Guardian._

Briefly the thought rendered him breathless. The certainty of it, when he knew very well that no one could predict a Guardian’s becoming. Then he saw Kirschen and Hedi exchange uncertain looks, and his physical breath seized with the nagging cough, and that made Saul stir under his blanket. The lad shifted, mumbled, then sat up all at once on a surge of alarm — one that broke, rather despite him it seemed, into a sunny smile.

“You’re alive,” he told Festus as though that was meant to be a revelation to him. And now that smile took on a cocky edge of triumph. “I hope Stattenholme chokes on his fancy breakfast.”

To Festus’s profound surprise, at his side, Kirschen gave the faintest huff of laughter.

Hedi cleared her throat. “Alive, and not nearly well enough yet to deal with politics,” she said firmly; then paused; then added, “But it would be good to hear what happened last night, while it’s fresh in your mind.”

“Who gave you the drink, lad?” Kirschen asked.

“The Duchess,” Saul answered without hesitation. He was sitting up now, bright and keen, and his focus was entirely on Festus, who drank in his words. “I don’t know how much she knew, but I’m sure it’s her husband’s plot. He’d been trying to talk me into killing you — said you wouldn’t believe me if I said so. Since Hyem was a civilized country.”

On either side of Festus, Kirschen and Hedi had both blanched. But he only felt a cool vindication. _A civilized country, eh, Your Grace_? “He thought he could convince you?”

“He said — if I brought him your head, Gabrello Attoré would take me back.” Saul’s voice slowed. “I don’t know if he was lying. Attoré _was_ always talking about you Hyemi interfering in the war… he had sources, Stattenholme said. Vestgaard. He said…” His eyes went round with sudden thought. “He said ‘sources’ when I asked about the shooting, too. How he knew about it so quickly. It was odd.”

Odd, yes; any number of things were. But Festus was briefly struck into silence. _Stattenholme told him he could go back._

“Ander,” he said, glad that any hoarseness in his voice would not ring suspicious, “Hedi, would you give us a little time here? Go make sure Mia eats something. Tell her the news, she’d hate to be left out.”

It took some back and forth, of course it did — it wasn’t for their obedience that he loved them — but at last, he was alone with the boy.

Saul was looking up at him, silent, curious. Festus breathed in and said, “Stattenholme told you you might return to Ilyiga.”

The boy looked away, and back. “If I killed you. He said I could be back by spring.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I would have. But,” and here he swallowed, “I believed you more.”

“That Attoré hadn’t the power to end your exile?”

“That I could be your soldier.” Another swallow. “Your man.”

 _My Guardian_. The thought came back, and this time it lodged itself under Festus’s breastbone.

It was too strange, too great a thought to let bloom now. Now he had a debt and a duty, and before his eyes, a path was opening that he could not have imagined.

He leaned in, closer to Saul. “You’ve done astoundingly well. You’ve foiled him more than you realize. I don’t know what Attoré might have done, but I’m certain Stattenholme never meant to send you back. He needed a scapegoat for this poison plot. I don’t doubt he wanted only to give you a plausible motivation.”

Saul mulled that over briefly, his thoughtful frown deepening into a scowl. “He does have dealings with Attoré, though. Geitenholme said so. That he plots with Ilyigan warlords and Lansikaan mercenaries. He plotted something with the Duchess’s brother this summer.”

“Where have you heard that?”

“I’ll show you.” Saul leapt to his feet and darted out, then back into the room, to hand Festus a charred scrap of paper. “It came for the Duchess a few days ago, when I was visiting. I took it from the fire.” He idly rubbed his hand. “Whatever they planned, it failed. But I don’t know what it was.”

Festus squinted at the soot-streaked letter. Not much was left of it, and his fever-slowed brain struggled to digest an avalanche of new facts. Gabrello Attoré wanted his head. Stattenholme dealt with him through Lansikaan mercenaries. A Lansikaan mercenary had come with the Duchess’s brother in from the south — and had not been with him when the young man had departed. And now this young man was warning his sister about a headless corpse. Abruptly Kirschen’s words were in his mind, eons ago: _Found the assassin with his head shot nearly off by his own gun — knew he had failed, I suppose._ Whatever they’d planned, it had failed…

And he knew.

“Sun’s _mercy_ .” The words left him in a strangled exhale. A bout of coughing followed, and he grabbed for the water Saul handed him with hands wildly unsteady. He had to tell Kirschen. Kirschen would go on the warpath. The bottle was evidence. The letter. Had to speak to Yorgen Geitenholme, re-examine everything the inquiry had. Parliament couldn’t know yet. How to act, when he’d be bedridden for days yet? Everything was spinning. If he were wrong — _I’m not wrong_.

War on false grounds, then. Cruel. But within grasp, after endless waiting, finally within his grasp. _What’s a kind war?_

Saul was looking at him wide-eyed. “Are you —”

“Fine.” Though he grabbed the boy’s shoulder again for support. “More than fine —”

“You don’t look —”

“Lad, listen to me.” At that Saul snapped to attention, leaning close so he could hear Festus’s whispered words. “Every single thing that happened since the shooting, I can turn around, with what you’ve given me. But you must do exactly as I say. I’m laying a trust on you greater than any I’ve laid on any man since the revolution.”

Saul’s eyes filled with a fearsome light. “Yes, sir.”

* * *

The clouds had cleared, and the sky was as black as a wild thing’s fur above the white-piled street. Four in the morning, and not a soul about to muddy the snow. Saul crouched on a leftover section of a collapsed wall overlooking the alley below, Detrich’s knife in his sleeve, and wishing he could spin it between his fingers. A crescent-moon night, wretchedly cold.

He was never going to find any damned beauty in winter in Hyem. But Detrich — newly on his feet after a week of bedrest that had turned his healing pneumonia into raging cabin fever — had deemed the night perfect for their purposes, and that filled the chill in Saul’s bones with the sweet shiver of expectation. He followed the path of the covered lantern as soon as he saw it coming toward him from the mouth of the alley. Like a floating ghost of light, held in a black-gloved hand near invisible in the gloom. The figure’s boots barely crunched on the snow for all its height. It glanced up at Saul from under its cowl.

Saul grinned. “Hello, Domé Vestgaard.”

Instantly, the Lansikaan knew what was afoot, and instantly, he turned on his heel to flee. That was expected. That was welcome. Saul launched himself off his perch like a hunting cat. 

Look for the weakness, Detrich had said; the Iselholmes’ Lansikaan retainers were all crippled fighters nursed back to health on the family’s money. When he crashed into Vestgaard’s back, the man’s left knee gave. Vestgaard was ready for that, shifting at once to compensate, but Saul rolled all his weight to one side and forced the mercenary to crash down on his own bad leg. He got the stunned hiss of pain he’d hoped for. Vestgaard had slipped a dagger from up his own sleeve. He slashed out and Saul danced back and felt pain blaze across his thigh, just enough moonlight to show him a splash of red on the snow. He was fighting with a man who could match him and he could weep for the joy of it.

Vestgaard’s lantern had fallen to the snow and been snuffed out. In the near-total dark, they went after each other’s lifeblood. Saul leapt and dodged, sweated and bled, and laughed, and thanked the Sun for Detrich’s training. And in the end, that first blow told. Vestgaard stumbled through one spin and his bad knee twisted aside in a painful crunch of sinew. Within a breath, Saul was kneeling on his chest with steel to his throat.

Vestgaard stared up at him with icy bemusement. “Take it we’re not going to Ilyiga, then.”

“Were we ever?”

“You call my master a liar?”

Saul answered in Ilyigan: “Your master wouldn’t know the truth if it lived up his mother’s hole.”

The mercenary gave a nasty chuckle, his throat vibrating against the knife. “How’s Detrich? A week of silence. Everyone getting nervous. The country feels it when a Land’s Own dies — but you wouldn’t know, eh?”

Saul laughed in his face and let his Adam’s apple taste the knife.

“I think I’ll ask the questions now,” he told the suddenly stiff Vestgaard. “Your friend who came here with the Duchess’s brother, but didn’t leave with him. Where is he?”

Vestgaard shifted his head minutely and twitched under him. The laughter had thrown the mercenary violently off his game. Saul moved to sink his knee under his ribs. Felt the beat of Vestgaard’s heart against his bone. Leaned in closer. “Did he also have a gun that shoots five hundred yards? What message did he bring your master from Attoré? How did the Duke know about the shooting weeks ahead of anyone else?” Vestgaard’s breathing had begun to labour under the pressure. He twitched again, hard, and Saul nestled the tip of his knife right where a jugular vein met the jaw. “Did he know it was coming?”

“Ach, just go ahead and stab me,” Vestgaard spat. “You know what I am? You know you don’t scare me, boy.”

“I could.”

“Could you? How long have you been to war, you still think torture ever works?”

Saul idly spun the knife’s tip and asked, “Does the Duchess know you let Yunas into the nursery that night?”

Even in the darkness, he could see Vestgaard’s face lose all colour. All cool defiance, too, like the air rushing out of a puncture. He continued, buoyed on that sudden terror like wind beneath his wings. “What if I hadn’t been there? She knows _I_ saved her child, not you. Does she know you chose her husband’s plans over her daughter’s life?”

Vestgaard swallowed. A pinprick of blood appeared under the knife-tip. “She’ll never believe you.”

“Your master said that about me telling Detrich he planned to kill him. He was lying then and you’re lying now.”

In one movement, all of his muscles working in conjunction, Vestgaard’s entire body jerked: a savage, desperate thrust to knock Saul off him. To rise. To turn the tables. One last chance. 

He was larger, much heavier. Strong as corded steel. By all rights he should have succeeded. But Saul was ready — oh, but how ready he was. How many times that week he had played this scene out in his mind: Vestgaard’s arrival, that first lunge, the fight and the pinning move and the words he would say in their wake, and now this last pitch for freedom and how he would break it. That moment when, after months of scrabbling survival, weeks of painful recovery, days of breathless waiting, he would at last put all his power to a worthy end.

As Vestgaard gasped beneath him, his strength spent on useless effort, Saul slid his off-hand under the mercenary’s coat and pulled out the beautiful little pistol he had spied there the day of their first meeting. With this in his own pocket, he settled comfortably on the chilled body beneath him. He would after all be there a while.

“Now,” he said. “I’m short on time, domé. Tomorrow morning my commander is going to speak to the Kaiser. So before the sun is up, you’re going to tell me exactly how Emen Stattenholme and Gabrello Attoré conspired to kill Festus Detrich.”

* * *

“Hello, Your Majesty.”

The day had dawned icy and brilliant. Outside the imperial palace, the weak winter sun dazzled oof white snow and white marble in all directions. Inside, the palace shutters and curtains were drawn, the doors were shut, and great fireplaces billowed suffocating heat into air lit no brighter than a weary yellow with scarce candles. But Festus threw those great doors open and stepped into the Kaiser’s inner apartments, Kirschen at his right shoulder and Basholme at his left, and the winter wind at his back. He was not expected there. But he was not stopped.

No guards were allowed past those doors. The servants had all been happy to clear the Land’s Own’s path. The Kaiserin had long left for her winter retreat with her young son. There was only Emen Stattenholme, standing by the exquisitely carved desk of ebony, one hand on the lacquered and ruby-inlaid surface. His fingers were white against the black and gold and red.

And in a tall-backed chair in the corner, so tall that the back towered over his hunched-over form, sat, pale and shrunken and rheumy-eyed, Kaiser Freider of Hyem.

“Festus,” he said tremulously.

Stattenholme took one step into the three men’s path. The look he gave Festus showed no more than a split-second’s tightening of his eyes. “You have not been granted an audience.”

“I have an urgent matter to bring to His Majesty’s attention.”

“Which is?”

“That his most loyal servant is guilty of attempting to assassinate his Land’s Own Guardian.” The Duke didn’t so much as flinch at that, but Festus had not expected him to. He turned and addressed not Stattenholme, but the Kaiser. “But perhaps I needn’t have hurried, eh, Your Majesty? Perhaps you know already.”

Every bit of confidence, savvy, every bit of control over his responses that Stattenholme had, the Kaiser lacked entirely. The words went like a sword through the little man’s guts. His face opened with horror. He glanced at once at the Duke.

 _I wasn’t wrong_. Festus could hardly tell his fury from his raw, ugly delight.

“Emen,” the Kaiser choked out.

Stattenholme’s serenity had turned to the stillness of a frozen river. “What is this nonsense, Detrich?”

“I’ll not start on the matter of the whiskey.” Festus flicked a hand in dismissal, a gesture straight out of the Duke’s own repertoire. “The evidence for that is much too clear to need lingering on. Unless you mean to suggest the actual poisoner was someone else.”

“Your boy received the bottle from my wife’s hand, did he not? Not mine.”

Basholme gave a mighty snort of astonishment. “Sun’s _mercy_ , Stattenholme,” Kirschen said in a near-whisper.

Stattenholme did not spare them a glance. He met Festus’s eyes dead on. “My Anké has spirit but no sense. So it often is with women —”

“Spare me _that_ if nothing else,” Festus cut him off without thinking, and saw him blink in a split-second’s outrage. “You’re no fool. In fact that’s what stumped me, thinking all this through. Why would _you_ commit to such a scheme — working with Gabrello Attoré to shoot me dead? Inviting the assassin in as your brother-in-law’s bodyguard. Arming him with your own retainer’s weapon and concealing the man’s journey back east. Providing him with the details of my own travels. Then erasing the tracks through your control of the inquiry — it’s a great deal of damned convoluted effort. And the risk of my _casus belli_ for war, of course. It’s not like you. None of us could understand it.”

And again he turned to the Kaiser, who had been shrinking in his seat more and more with every sentence out of Festus’s mouth. And he said, “Until I realized it wasn’t _your_ plan at all.”

Kaiser Freider was breathing so quickly he was trembling with it, tiny jolts in and out like a rabbit’s heartbeat. “You cannot mean it. You cannot mean to suggest it. I am His Imperial Majesty of Hyem. That I would — my country’s own Land’s Own Guardian — that I —”

Festus returned to the Duke.

“Why on earth did you do it, Stattenholme?” he asked quietly. “You’re a vile creature, but your gifts aren’t all in what your ancestors robbed and stocked up for you. You have wits. Courage. Patience I can only dream of. Why do you bind yourself to _that_?”

He didn’t need to point to Freider, whose bloodless mouth opened and closed in silent panic. Stattenholme didn’t need to look his master’s way. The Duke was still all over, still as marble. His chest riding and falling in precise measures. His bloodless hand pressed flat against the cold of the precious stones.

But his mouth curved very faintly upward, the bitterest of smiles.

“Please, Detrich,” he said. “It’s as if you still haven’t the faintest clue what power really is.”

He sighed, and pulled himself away from the desk to stand before the three of them, bodily between the Kaiser and Festus. “I doubt you have evidence of the scope to make such a ludicrous accusation stick.”

“Hard evidence? Not much to begin with, no.”

“Well, then —”

Festus cut him off again, this time with a grin at his affront. “What I _do_ have is two men in the Upper House, one who wants you ruined, and another terrified of my vengeance. One who’ll speak to your plotting with the Iselholmes — and with Adalas, as it happened — and one who’ll tell of the dams you’ve had destroyed and train you’ve had derailed to tire me out. And after that, Your Grace, I daresay the Upper House will let me speak as I please.” He took a step forward. “And once I can speak, I’ll gouge the truth from you on the witness stand.”

Stattenholme took a step of his own. “That is many afters and onces, Fro Detrich.”

“Yorgen will testify,” Basholme spoke up with cheerful malice. “We’ve reached a gentlemanly agreement.”

“So will Kopler,” said Kirschen, and only his cool eyes spoke of how that had been guaranteed.

Stattenholme spoke to Festus only: “Do you think you have the strength? Remember everything else you thought you had, these past weeks. Remember everything I’ve taken from you.”

“I do,” Festus answered in a low voice. _Oh, but I will remember._ “But the question is not whether you or I believe I can destroy you.” And he shifted his gaze again, and looked over the Duke’s shoulder and straight at the Kaiser. “The question is what His Majesty believes.”

And then there they were, both looking at His Imperial Majesty of Hyem. Watching him squirm like a worm on a hook.

“Emen,” he whimpered. “Emen, he mustn’t take you from me.”

The Duke spoke gently, “He cannot, Your Majesty.”

“He knows what we did! Please, he says he will destroy you. He cannot destroy you. You are my shield, the only hope of my line.”

“I shall shield you to the last.”

“I do not want a _last!_ Emen! Let him have what he wants, anything he wants, but _you_ must stay with me!”

Stattenholme opened his mouth again, but the Kaiser surged suddenly to his feet to shake a trembling finger at him. “Whatever he wants! Just give him his — his damned, evil war — what do I care if all that ungrateful rabble dies! Let him have it! Let him —”

“Sire,” Stattenholme’s voice was a reedy plea.

The Kaiser threw his hands in the air, shot out a final, “Do it!” and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

The Duke stood amidst the echo of that shout for another long moment. Stood silently staring at the closed door.

Then, slow — slow as a toppling oak, as the end of winter, slow as true change — he turned around to lean down on the table, letting his shoulders slump. Festus waited. He could be patient. Nothing to rush at now.

Power had said its piece; and at last, at last, that was all.

The Duke’s breathing was oddly loud in the closed, stuffy room. His eyes were shut. “How did you survive?” he asked in a whisper.

No reason not to tell him. “Saul drank your poison and realized what was happening. Did you think he’d let me die?”

“I thought he… would not terribly care. You realize he is a monster, your boy. Perhaps a worse monster than you.” Stattenholme’s shoulders shook on an inhale. “Two of a kind, perhaps. Is that why he trusted you after all? _Why_ do they all trust you?”

Festus said nothing: for the first time, it occurred to him that Emen Stattenholme hadn’t the faintest clue what trust really was.

After another drawn-out minute in the silence, Stattenholme at last pulled his spine straight to lift up his head, and turned around to face his Land’s Own Guardian again.

“Saul realized — and?”

“I drew on the web.” He would not lie on this. Not even to the Duke.

Stattenholme’s mouth twitched. “So much for your vaunted principle, Fro Detrich.”

“ _A civilized country_ , Your Grace?”

“I have done what needed doing. For Hyem.”

“So have I.”

Stattenholme only looked at him, mute. And if it had ever seemed that there had been another option, another life, then surely that was just a dream.

“So here is what will happen, Fro Stattenholme,” Festus said, tasting the sweetest of the words. “My man Samaren will kill Cullough — your sacrifice. We will of course give Adalas an inquiry. And in the inquiry it will emerge that the queen’s son-in-law was responsible for my poisoning. That will suffice to challenge Adalas. Dissolve the matter of the shooting as you please. If you cooperate, the blame stops with Cullough; if you do not, I will bring you up to testify, and have the full truth out in the sight of all the country.”

He dared not let his breath out just yet, perfectly ready for another push. But the Duke only bowed his head.

“As you will, Land’s Own Guardian,” he said; and just like that, one war was over, and another could begin.

* * *

They drank Hyemi schnapps that night in the Land’s Own’s house; Adalan whiskey could not be had in the market anymore. Saul had taken one sip of the crisp, fruity drink, decided he much preferred it, and happily gave himself over to entirely guiltless drunkenness. A toast of thanksgiving, a drink to the Sun of war and of oaths — it was both, and a victory banquet, too, in a way. Certainly Kirschen and Basholme, who sat to either side of Detrich on the sitting room’s couch before the fire, had the air of such about them: the Major with loud exuberance, the General in the intensity of his quiet satisfaction. Mia and Alamann were more subdued, but their satisfaction was unmistakable. Only Hedi seemed sombre, though she drank readily enough with the rest.

And Detrich. Detrich laughed at Basholme’s comments, and put his arm around Kirschen’s waist, and told Mia and Alamann to go on and drink as they pleased. But for himself, he did not touch a drop. The conversation flowed around him; his eyes were on the flickering fire.

Still recovering his energy, perhaps. The others said nothing of it, and Saul didn’t, either. He was pleased enough to drink and feel the sweet bite bring heat to his chest and face, to indulge Kirschen’s questions about river warfare tactics in Ilyiga, happily insult Basholme’s impiety, goad Mia into a furious vow to tie him down someday and shave off all his wildcat hair (“and eyebrows, too, you brat!”). Simple things. Peaceful.

But the season of war was coming. And he knew his orders and his commander.

The little band stayed up until well after the clocks chimed one past midnight. At last Alamann nodded off on Mia’s shoulder, and Basholme sighed about his wife, and Kirschen murmured something in Detrich’s ear that made him perk up and send the lot of them off. Saul wandered out the door as they left, to let the icy night blow some of the fog of the drink away. He looked across the yard to the gate as it swung shut, leaving him safely within, the door open at his back.

When he turned to go back inside, Detrich was in the doorway.

Despite the hour, the long evening, the Land’s Own’s eyes were keen. He was holding a glass with just a splash of the schnapps inside it. He came forward to join Saul on the frosted grass, their eyes turned the same way.

“The good soldiers of Hyem,” Detrich murmured at last. He was seeing beyond the gate, Saul knew; beyond the quarter, beyond the city. He brought the glass up for one quick sip that drained it.

“It’ll be a race, ‘til spring,” he added after a moment’s silence. “Though we’ll have the advantage of choosing the moment. The popular momentum, I can recapture, now I’ve something to harness it to. But there are roads to build. Funds to raise. Resources to commandeer for the state…”

“Are you worried? About winning the war?”

“Of course I am. Did you think it was a given?” He looked almost amused when Saul shrugged as though the answer was obvious. “They’ll call me a gambler. It’s a hideous risk… but those are easy to take, when there isn’t another choice.”

“And if we lose?”

“Hyem will recover. We have before, every time we lost to Adalas. But if all the war’s sacrifices, all the deaths coming would have been for nothing…”

He trailed off. Saul looked up at him, found a darkness in his eyes. “Isn’t it a worthy end?”

Detrich looked down in return, that darkness pointed and piercing. “War isn’t an end, it’s a means. It’s a price.”

He put a hand on Saul’s shoulder. Solid. Weighty.

“You’ll do two more things for me, lad, before the war.”

“Sir.”

“First, you will kill Cullough. Best if it’s not a Hyemi man who does it, or Adalas might decide to take the initiative. This isn’t completely without danger to you, mind. I want you aware of that. And acting willingly.”

 _Willingly_. As if there were anything in the world he was more willing to do than kill by Detrich’s command. “I understand.”

Detrich gave Saul’s shoulder a quick squeeze. _I know._

“And second, you’ll put more time into your studies. In a year or two I mean to send you to university.”

 _That_ , Saul had had absolutely no expectation of. For a moment he was certain the liquor was playing tricks on his brain. He stared at his patron, his commander. “What? What am I going to do at university?”

“One studies, normally.”

“What am I supposed to study?”

“Whatever you wish. Languages, maybe, you’ve a good mind for those. Mathematics, natural sciences — you liked the waterwheel, didn’t you? You could learn to build those. I almost did, before my sponsor chose law instead. I won’t choose for you. It’ll be what you want.”

“I want to be a soldier.”

Detrich’s face did not change, but his fingers shivered on Saul’s shoulder.

In the end he said nothing, only gave another squeeze of his hand: this one tighter, warmer, almost a gesture of comfort.

“Let’s win the war first,” he said. “The rest will come after.”

 _After_ . Saul nodded once, back at ease. _After the war_. He still could not imagine it; but if Detrich could, then Saul could be patient. Spring would come.

END ACT II


End file.
